It's one of the best games of the last decade. You'll lose 150 hours to it easily. Don't be discouraged by the difficulty, Souls games can be hard to get into at first. Once you understand it, it gets easier.
There's only a dozen or so mandatory bosses, the rest are optional. So if you decide you just want to wrap it up and finish you can, long before you explore everything.
Difficulty is something that definitely discourage me and many people from playing any game. I rather have the sensation of the game getting easier being tied to the characters leveling up than to my horrible dexterity and hand eye coordination.
At the beginning of the game i can't really tell what parts are supposed to be hard but fair at my current level and what parts are purposefully hard as to tell me to "come back later when you're stronger" so to speak
If you're not getting one shot very often and able to overcome challenges with ingenuity and grit, I'd say you're doing it right.
Once you start running into enemies/bosses that one shot you, that's when you may want to consider going and farming and leveling up your Vigor until you can take a hit or two. Other than that just keep dumping points into skills you need for the weapon you want to use.
Don't worry about screwing up your talent points, you can unlock respect pretty early in the game (second great rune holding boss).
Also, nice taste in games. I'm still on the fence about Elden Ring though, since I know damn well how easily I'm frustrated. But even just exploring the world seems to be cool
I bought Call of Duty 4 on Steam in 2008 and downloaded it on my neighbor's unsecured wifi network, which was the only internet I had at the time. It took almost a week.