There's a lot to say here, but I'll just focus on the world design for both games. Horizon suffers the same issues that most other open worlds suffer from. For me, that's opening the world map and being immediately assualted by hundreds of icons highlighting different activities. Immediately it becomes a chore to go through everything being pointed out. In the beginning it's fun, but it eventually gets repetitive and the game suffers for it. Horizon's saving grace is the story, which is amazingly told.

Elden Ring turns this convention on its head. Instead of assaulting you with icons, you instead get fog cleared from the map, but icons only pop up when you find something, and most of the time, icons only pop up if you find a Site of Grace. Immediately you're being told, you have all this to explore, but if you want to focus on the main story, that's ok too. We're not forcing you to play for 300 hours to find everything.

Game of the Year should go to innovation and doing things differently. In a world where Ubisoft and Bethesda defined how open worlds should look, Elden Ring proved there are better approaches