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.