I think the world of Dark Souls 3 is really interesting and I appreciated navigating it and seeing the places where things did interconnect. Sure, Dark Souls 1 does that better and that definitely plays a part in why it's my favorite. I thought that the lore on display was pretty fascinating in how it linked back and brought cohesion to the entire arc of the games.
Broadly speaking, all of the games provide the same thing to me, which is a challenging quest of exploration and discovery. There's all sorts of hidden tidbits to uncover, whether it's hidden areas or pieces of story or gear or whatever. Regardless of the game of the series, they all do that stuff incredibly well. The extremely tight gameplay mechanics and the wide variety of build types and play styles make all of the games extremely fun.
With Dark Souls 3 in particular, I felt that they meshed the best parts of Bloodborne's mechanics with the best parts of the more traditional Souls mechanics. This made the gameplay experience extremely enjoyable and the game just felt like an incredible step up after Dark Souls 2. I literally had to stop myself from playing the game a fifth time through after it came out and just move over to finally playing through Bloodborne. To me, that's a pretty clear indication of how tight of a grip Dark Souls 3 had on me.
I think it just comes down to what you want out of the games. While all similar, DaS 1/2/3, DeS, and BB all offer something a bit different and their differences make them unique and interesting to me. First and foremost, I'm a gameplay guy and I think Dark Souls 3 really did it best in the whole series. But as an overall experience, there's just no question that Dark Souls 1 has the best stuff on offer.
I do think that one of the worst decisions they ever made in the series was moving back to having that Nexus-style hub space. Leveling up at a bonfire was awesome and made them feel so much more important in the grand scheme of the game. While Firelink always felt like "home," it didn't play a special role, other than being a centralls located area where other parts of the world looped back to. Majula was a weird cross of the Nexus from DeS and Firelink in DaS, but DS3 and Bloodborne's central areas were totally isolated from the rest of the world, which was a shame. I hope if there's ever a new Dark Souls or another Bloodborne-type spin-off they reassess this decision and leverage the original Dark Souls blueprint.
