Other then a few early levels the areas in DS2 felt much more like tubes focusing you along to a dead end and much more 'video gamey' then either previous game. Sure, I preferred the interconnecting world of DS1, but I also preferred the design from DeS as well which wasn't interconnected. Just, on a whole, I was disappointed in a lot of them.) And, to be fair, some of DS2's areas were really great. I'm not saying I'm right, and people who liked DS2's worlds are wrong. The feeling I was left with was that there was this internal push to make the game 'bigger', and the solution for that was making areas that had more square footage but less complexity to them, versus the opposite like we saw previously. Design, positioning of elements, texture work, thought put into architecture, etc.
They were set pieces for a game, not a world I was exploring. On the other had, too many areas of DS2, for me, felt like video game stages. They felt like structures that existed in a world, placed really thought about not just on a horizontal level but also on a vertical and diagonal one. I think both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls had areas that really felt constructed and developed. It isn't just the inter-connected world aspect�it's world design as a whole.
