The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s next generation upgrade has placed it in lofty company in 2022. The game is now the second highest rated PlayStation 5 game for the year.

In Metacritic rankings, Elden Ring and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt now both hold a rating of 96. That places God of War: Ragnarok, the biggest PlayStation 5 release for the second half of the year, at third place at 94.

To be clear, there is no point quibbling the finer details of these ratings down to the numbers. All three are the best games that have come out for this year, an extra impressive accomplishment given that they were produced during the pandemic years. If we look beyond the finer details of top game of the year, it’s clear that all of these games have been critical and commercial successes.

There are some interesting things to say about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt taking this accolade today. In its original release in 2015, the game reached a rating of 92. That increase in rating reflects the improvements made in the next generation upgrade, but truth be told, the increase isn’t that high for what was already a beloved game.

What it really says is that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt holds up very well, having been released as a soft launch title for the current generation of consoles.

All three games have been doing well in the run up to the end of this year as well. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt actually went past the 1 million sales mark in Japan days before the next gen update went live. While it isn’t clear how much of a factor the next gen update was to those sales, this is a particularly impressive achievement as the Japanese gamer audience is notorious for being finicky about Western games.

Also, just last week God of War: Ragnarok went back up to the top of the UK sales charts. PC gamers may still be holding out for when PlayStation Studios is expected to release the game to PC, but they may have to wait a while until Sony decides they had gotten the most out of the captive PlayStation audience.

Elden Ring wasn’t likely to see a surge in sales for the holidays. It’s just too far off from its original release date. Of course, as we know, it took top prize as Game of the Year in the recent The Game Awards, so it’s in good standing still.

2023 promises the releases of Redfall and Starfield, and possibly the future of the meta scores in video games will this time be dominated by Team Green instead of Team Blue. But then again, with Square Enix bringing Final Fantasy 16 and Forspoken for the year, they might rein it back again. It’ll be an amazing year either way.

Source: GameRant