Is Elden Ring really the best game of the last decade?

[Forge89]

Elden Ring swept basically every major game of the year award and keeps getting cited as the defining game of the last decade, praised for combining FromSoftware's genuinely demanding combat with an open world structure that finally gave players real freedom in exploration order. Millions of copies sold and a genuinely massive ongoing community suggest the acclaim wasn't just critic hype either. Curious whether people think it actually earns that decade defining reputation or whether something else deserves the crown instead

The counterargument usually points to games like Breath of the Wild arguably doing the open world reinvention first and more elegantly, or The Last of Us Part II pushing narrative ambition further even if it proved genuinely divisive among players. Elden Ring's genuinely brutal difficulty also locked plenty of players out entirely from ever finishing it. Feels like a real tension between critical acclaim, commercial success and actual accessibility

What's your actual pick for the best game of the last ten years. Genuinely curious how people are weighing all these different factors here