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No...they expect you to play this game with a curious heart like games from yesteryear allowed; no hand-holding for adults.
Part of the charm of Elden Ring is courageously moving onward and upward through new and uncertain locales and overcoming whatever springs up on you...like a true Elden Lord.
I remember back in the early days of DAOC and there was no mini map or coordinate system. If we wanted to find a cave again after discovering it while exploring, we had to use landmarks.
I get the same feeling with ER, because I can explore and hear all the different stories. It's up to me to remember all the stuff I find and hear about. I don't want the game doing that for me. Then I get to choose where I go, can't do that with theme park games.
And it doesn't matter if I beat the game or find only the best stuff, because eventually I will as I play through the game with different characters. That's half the fun, I rarely go to the internet for anything more than finding out about bugs or broken game loops.
You have a head on your shoulders, right? Go anywhere and explore the open world.
Varre literally tells you to follow the guidance of Grace. That's the wispy, golden trails that some Graces emanate. On your map they are arrows of sorts. They point to shardbearers and other points of interest.
Other than that, just explore and figure things out on your own. If a boss is too tough go explore elsewhere. This game is open world after all. If you want quest objectives and map markers clogging up your UI and disrespecting your intelligence, then you're playing the wrong game.
It's not unplayable, far from it. The real issue is that FromSoftware is not very good at building game worlds and long ago decided that it was appropriate to conflate narrative mystery with not letting the player understand basic game systems.
If we look at Demon's Souls we see individual game levels in the Archstones that were self-contained and genuinely awesome. We see the same thing in Dark Souls (minus Izalith) and even in Dark Souls II, which was a great set of levels that were poorly linked to create a world. Level design is something they're good at and the linear, if branching, paths of those levels don't allow players to become directionless.
Unfortunately, starting with Soul Tendency and World Tendency in Demon's Souls, FromSoftware doesn't have much interest in explaining things to the player even when they provide information. For example, World Tendency wasn't ever clear and when you played online you (1) reset your World Tendency to that of the online average for an Archstone and (2) you could only find some items during certain World Tendency levels, things that were not explained to players in-game or found in any reliable way in-game.
In Elden Ring we have solid examples in that Sorcery is hidden away if you didn't start out with the ability to cast Sorceries and, without explicitly coming across the Rune Arc item, there is no way to tell why a restored Great Rune isn't providing benefits. FromSoftware's SoulsBorne games are needlessly obtuse and, for whatever reason or reasons, a sizable portion of the fanbase finds this to be appropriate. It's not a lack of hand-holding', it's genuinely bad design.
As someone that loves these games and is critical of them because of that love, I'm telling you that you're in for a bad time until the game clicks -and even then there is going to be so much that drives you mad, but underneath that you'll love it. If you need to play with a wiki, do it up, because you're going to need to learn to love these games.
Addendum
My favourite games, not just in the series but in general, are BloodBorne and Demon's Souls. In the series, it'd follow as BloodBorne, Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls III, Dark Souls II. I've never struggled to play a SoulsBorne title, to actually understand what's happening and why, until Elden Ring.
It plays exactly like SoulsBorne, but it's not supposed to be played like SoulsBorne. It's similar to the Sekiro situation, where SoulsBorne players had to unlearn a lot of what we were taught by FromSoftware and play differently. That's fine, because things were genuinely different. This is open world SoulsBorne and yet it can be played like neither an open world game nor a SoulsBorne game, it's its own awkward thing.
There is virtually no direction and the apparent expectation is that players will just wander off and figure things out, that they'll just keep at it despite the nonsense. (It's very similar to Darkest Dungeon in how disrespectful it is of the player's time.) And yet, here, the player is consistently beset by annoyances and design issues that make me wonder 'am I dying here because the game doesn't want me to go here or am I dying because the design is bad'.
I know that I'm supposed to explore and I want to explore, but there is just too much that can be labelled as 'should I save this for later because I don't have X, Y, or Z yet, or am I supposed to skill up and push on'. That's a terrible position for a player to be in.
ubisoft gave people brainrot i swear