Definitely too many random worthless rune rewards for exploration in the game, and the game already has weird issues with how convoluted and breakable some of its' quests are. People should not have to read hours worth of guides before they make a move in the story or side quest. People are so scared of "messing up" their playthrough now, they won't do a thing without touching a guide first. Blind playthroughs should be rewarding, but in this game, it's more punishing as far as properly following a quest goes. This is the fear that this game puts into players, and honestly, it isn't fun, as the game is always auto saving too, so you're screwed. It doesn't help but some of the quests feel really pointless too.
A good example of this is Rogier's quest. If you reach Ranni's Rise in Three Sisters and speak to her, the progress on his quest just stops, which means you can't give him the black knife print that took forever to get to. Say goodbye to your 100+ hour completionist playthrough because one mistake. At no point in the game are you warned or hinted this is going to happen, and it's not even like it's some big major plot thing either, it's just a typical FromSoftware thing to do as far as quest progression in this game.
I say this as a FromSoftware loyalist since Demon's Souls, I think a lot of these quests feel rushed. I absolutely love the game otherwise, but there's a lot of laziness with most of the dungeons looking like carbon copies of all the other ones, as well as tons of recycled bosses.
