Played about 5 hours of DS II and I can easily say that DS 1 has a much superior game design. Not only in terms of magnificent world design, but also area design where DS 1 provided many routes to reach different destinations within a given area without forcing the player through bottlenecks of enemies.
In DS2, bonefires are aplenty and there is no complaint there which is appropriate with the increased size of the world and therefore fast travel feature. However, you can feel that these bonefire areas are 'forced' where you see a patch of land being specifically cut from the geometry to place these bonefires. In DS1 bonefires felt more 'organic' into the surrounding and fitted nicely into the world.
The atmosphere in DS1 I felt is also better.
The UI and inventory is still terrible in DS 2 as it was in DS 1.
There are also some design quirks in DS 2 that don't make a lot of sense in terms of monster placement and design. And those pig creatures in Majula, what is wrong with the designers, I can kill hulking beasts with 3 - 4 slashes and it took me 3 - 4 minutes of continous hacking and slashing just to kill one of those pigs!
On the other hand, DS 2 is technically much superior in terms of robustness with different hardware (PC in particular) compared to the horrible DS 1 port.
Having said that, I am enjoying DS 2 and probably these initial impressions will just be insignificant in comparions to what is going to follow.