The thing about the Dark Souls games (again, I can't speak on Elden Ring) is that the vast majority of the "storytelling" you're talking about happened in the long distant past of the dead world you inhabit.
I understand that. I just don't agree that Dark Souls does it particularly well. The world building doesn't feel compelling enough to make me believe that its a world that could have actually existed. The only way I can really describe it, is that it doesn't feel immersive to me in the way something like Night City does. It feels more like I'm walking across a theater stage and I have to work extra hard to suspend my disbelief in order to make it all shake out.
Everything else is ancillary and non-essential lore from hundreds or thousands of years in the past and I don't see what's wrong with making that stuff difficult and labyrinthine.
Nothing in principal, however my issues remain in the execution. I think From Soft executes it poorly, because From Soft have no writers that are worth a damn, and never have. No one gives a shit about From Soft's lore aside from Youtubers who make it their jobs to fill in the blanks and actually prepare a narrative to tell an interested (and notably unsatisfied) audience. People expect great combat from From Soft and that's what they get.
Making the history of the world relatively opaque and full of spotty information makes it feel authentic, rather than (once again) wiki-izing everything with concrete answers to every question and a comprehensive timeline of every event, right down to Gwyn's childhood trauma that made him want to kill ancient dragons or some equally retarded shit.
You can do both things at once. Look at the general lore of Westeros for example. A lot of Westorosi history is written definitively, enough that you can get a backbone and understand how the world works, who the major players are, what empires are where etc. and yet there are still things left to interpretation like the fate of Daemon Targaryan who according to Westorsi historians is dead, and yet all note his body, nor his weapons and armor were ever discovered after his final battle in which his dragon, his enemy's dragon, and his enemy's body were discovered, and yet he never appears in the lore after this point. So we don't have a set in stone answer on whatever happened with Daemon, its open to interpretation, but we still know who Daemon was, what he did, and why its interesting we don't know how his story ends.
Also, edit here, The same fat fuck who wrote Daemon Targaryan is the same fat fuck From Soft hired to do the story for Elden Ring and then barely fucking utilized. They had a guy who knows how to do this better than they do, and they still fucked it up.
