Couple complaints about this game, though I haven't thoroughly investigated them, so I may be wrong (hopefully I am):
1. The online system is completely inferior to Demon's Souls, for two reasons. Firstly, because they split players into different instances, you won't have the ENTIRE community around to summon your soul signs, or to invade, or anything. Just a fractured portion. Now I'm not sure how they do grouping, maybe they split it by zones (ie. if 100 players are in Darkroot, then they'll all be in one online group, and if someone moves to Andor Londo, then they'll join the Ando group, etc). That would be ideal and would make the split groups a non-issue.
But more importantly, the human/hollow system is not as good as Demon's Souls' spirit/human system. In DS1, you would revive automatically after defeating a boss. That's not the case here - you have to spend humanity in order to revive. On top of that, in DS1, the advantages to being human were obvious: you had 25% more health, and you could switch out your Cling Ring for something else. In this, there differences between Human and Hollow are really small, so no one is ever in human form. That makes random PvP a lot more rare, which is not good.
I'm sure there will be PvP hotspots that everyone will gravitate to, but random invasions basically never happen in this game, which is a real shame.
2. Weapon scaling. Lightning weapons and fire weapons are too good. Why pump your strength/dex up to 40-50 and beyond when you can just get the bare minimum to use a weapon, and upgrade to +5 lightning and start doing 500 damage per hit? You could dump all of those extra points into vitality and endurance, or max out magic/faith if you want. Normal +15 weapons are strong for sure, but you need all of those points in str/dex to make up the difference.
Perhaps there are lightning resistance sets that nullify the bonus lightning weapons give you, I'm not sure but I'll have to check that out further. That's pretty much the only way PvP won't be boiled down to just a handful of optimal builds.
@lyte: you'll find some bows eventually, and there's also a merchant in the Undead Burge (or maybe he's in the Parish, don't remember) that sells bows and arrows, so I wouldn't worry about it for now.