The problem with Das3 is that it's too small; playing dark souls 1, you can see how similar 3 was trying to be to 1, but the big difference is the bonfire spread; physically, the bonfires are rather close to each other in ds1, but you'd have to take a very long and winding road to actually get to the next one, and when you get the short cut about thirty minutes later you make that bonfire useless, but sometimes those shortcuts come after their own winding path, or they actually thought about the difference in where the bonfires are. Even in the opening area, two bonfires are not that far from each other, but the distance between the first bonfire in the level and the second one is you have to fight a slog of enemies to get to the first one, and then you have to get through another bunch of enemies, a boss, a possible miniboss if you don't mind your manners, and a really hard enemy if you're feeling lucky. And even after that, you don't get a bonfire for every boss, you sometimes even have to backtrack out of boss rooms if you want a fire, and the only ones that really do give a fire are the 4 lords, gwyn, nito, the witch who became the bed of chaos, and seath, who wasn't really a lord, actually a duke, but I nearly forgot as I write that there were only 3 lords you fight and the 4th is locked behind DLC for lore.
Anyway, the biggest problem is that ALL the bosses have a bonfire that you can warp from. on top of that, the areas are all so small already that you wouldn't need to warp around, but it makes the world feel even smaller because you can just pop right up to wherever you want to go in an instant. If you're having trouble with a boss you can just warp out to a different place and fight a different boss at your leisure to get the souls to fight another boss. If you removed every boss bonfire excepting the lords of cinder, and maybe the deacons of the deep because their boss room is a dead end, and I continue to exclude the last demon king because that area is supposed to mirror blight town at least a little bit and it brings back memories of having to sit at a bonfire uptop, take the elevators all the way down to the spider cunt and homeward bone so I didn't have to walk through the shit just to get back home.
the big reason they put in weapon arts was probably to do away with parrying, because parrying has always been shit, and to expand every weapon an extra two moves, meaning the machete weapons at least don't need to have that one overhead move they do no matter what. On the topic of that, I think the overhead is just like a stab without doing stab damage; it goes straight forward in a line and deals damage only in that line in front of you; it would have been better if it did some diagonal like guts can do in the Holy Demon War game if you keep doing a strike and moving forward and he just does diagonals all day. Heavy could have been an overhead or a horizontal slash if you two hand it, maybe mix it up like the amount of care they put in to ultra great swords where they all have a very specifically unique play style and they only share a few attacks I bring this up because they quite heavily rip off berserk and the games that berserk has out, which isn't really that big a deal, but I think so because there's barely one idea that is entirely unique to FROM, but the one stand out thing is that the fume greatsword has a unique stomp overhead, which a couple of UGSes have, but this one smashes down with the broad end, like guts did to the guy when he was fighting him in that small room with the pillars all over the place. Again, that is a very specific and unique animation that no other sword has that they put effort into for fan service for a different series, but they couldn't be arsed to make a more varied moveset for the fucking great axe class.
there's obviously a lot of overlap in the development of all these titles; DS1 had some lingering ideas from bloodborne before it became a trailer even, DS2 had this to a slightly greater degree I'm sure, and DS3 was right at the epicenter, and because it's the same company I can't fault them for sharing ideas around that takes it away from what DS1 was. The thing that makes it wrong is they took enemy ideas from bloodborne and didn't properly balance them with the dark souls player character. They've had this problem before slightly, but it was moreso that the enemies have such a high closing-in capability when you're meant to run away and take out enemies solo.
So TL;DR
They rushed this game out and didn't give themselves the time they needed to balance the game, they filled in the low production capabilities with rehashed ideas from other games and the game is full of its own unique ideas that would be great if it wasn't poured over this mess of berserk references+skirts