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Is open-world design making games worse, or am I just getting old?

Around the time that Elden Ring came out, I had the thought that it seemed like AAA games were getting worse, especially post-pandemic. Elden Ring was both open-world and loudly heralded as one of the best games in years; however it seemed like, in general, there were more and more open-world games and more games in large franchises (rather than new IP). Unlike Elden Ring, on average, I felt like these games were not very good. My hypothesis was that the open-world “genre” was increasing because it’s easier to scale-up an open-world game to match the expectations on today’s games—give each designer a separate region, cut dependencies between various levels and teams.

The main driver for progressing in a game stops being winning or going on a journey with the characters, and becomes completing a map and making stats go up. The population for the data analysis will be _any game released on a Generation V or newer non-smartphone, non-portable console platform in IGDB. Since Metacritic is an aggregator, we can expect some sort of smoothing of the underlying curve to a target distribution to account for rating inflation, which might hide some trends.

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