An anti-cheating system and an actual inventory system would be nice. Also, perhaps limit endgame weapons to be found towards the endgame...I ran into a black knight halberd early on and it was pretty much easy mode from there. I had to actually bottomless box the damn thing, it was making my game too easy.
I like the minimalist storytelling style of Dark Souls; it reminds me of an amazing Civ 4 mod called Fall from Heaven, in which bits and pieces of the setting would be revealed when you built certain structures, came across certain items, ran into certain characters / bosses, etc. None of it was conventional setting description either; rather, you might click on one character and get part of an anecdote from his or her life. Later, you might run into a few other characters that have the rest of the anecdote, or maybe even the same story from a different point of view.
Anyway, what made Fall from Heaven more satisfying than Dark Souls was that each time you got part of a part of the story/setting, it was several paragraphs, maybe a page or two of solid material. The setting was still highly minimalist; you pieced together what happened by piecing together various stories of people's lives. But Fall from Heaven understood that you can have minimalist, vague setting while still telling a lot, and writing characters that players can really relate to/empathize with/hate/etc. Dark Souls just doesn't have too much...sad things happen to lots of people and we feel bad about it, but the characterization of those people is almost nonexistent.
So, my suggestion: keep the storytelling style, but put more material into little unrelated side story. Stick a few good paragraphs of storytelling in the item descriptions of each piece of gear; tell a lot of anecdotes from different people's points of view, some totally unrelated to the main backstory, some offering small glimpses of what went down, but obviously from a biased/unreliable perspective.
