Civility argument is about protecting the powerful. Let people have opinions. We all know why people are upset. Downplaying it just makes someone sound like an apologist.
Sites like IGN must follow gaming trends to survive. BG3 is a huge release and I've been seeing this story everywhere for weeks, increasing in frequency.
That would be cool. There's a vast amount of time between when the Lords rose up and defeated the dragons and the decline we see in DS1. We don't even see the rise of the Dark Sign and start of undead plague, but the end of it when the world has mostly dealt with it and is slowly falling apart. The rise of the Dark Sign, fall of Artorias in Oolacile could all be really cool.
Exactly. Nintendo has targeted game styles that are largely being shared by smaller developers. AAA devs pretty much have to push visual boundaries in order to sell consoles while Nintendo focuses on whatever new major feature their newest console has (Wii: motion, WiiU: semi-handheld, Switch: hybrid handheld). Nintendo hasn't tried to compete with the big consoles at least since Gamecube. And their focus on few, high-quality titles for first party series means they have nearly guaranteed success every console generation (actual guaranteed success with pokemon).
How are they going to structure this? Castlevania felt easier since there was so little story baked-in. But Miyazaki specifically made Dark Souls games hard to parse because he was trying to recreate the effect of reading english fantasy novels when he wasn't fully fluent in english.
The story in Fromsoft games are specifically sparse, spread out and require interpretation to grasp more than the bare surface. Most of the NPCs that give you meaningful dialogue are somewhat hidden. If they play is straight like a normal show, it might not feel like Dark Souls. If they make it obtuse, it'll be hard for viewers to parse in a 6-12 hour series compared to the dozens of hours players get to think on it.
Their management kind of sucks but that isn't rare in games publishing. Publisher make insane moves all the time. Unfortunately for MS, from your list only Halo is relevant and that has had rocky releases for quite a while. Now that they can sequester Bethesda and Activision games they can probably be hands-off and just wait for exclusive sales to come in.
Xbox because it doesn't have exclusives appealing enough to make them pick it over the alternatives.
Soon. Their acquisition of Bethesda and now Activision will push a lot of in-demand titles to Xbox and PC going forward. They'll be a lot more "competitive" with Sony now.