It did not release tho.

I know, in some way they are.. intriguing.

Ah, I remember a case where the art-style became worse.

Xenoblade Chronicles was pretty and full of ideas in world and art:

and while XCX still was beautiful in most parts, it was overall created with a lot less imagination:

Breath of the Wild, both versions, is around 10 million copies sold. There's no hope of a return to the classic formula anytime soon. "Open air" is here to stay.

Best:

Worst:

Gross. I'll always hate when games with nice and colorful artstyles get downgraded to boring realism, as if we didn't have enough of that already. And don't even get me started on the game itself, sigh...

No screenshots, sorry. But what springs to mind of games I've played are:

Homefront
From trying to create a realistic portray of an occupied America complete with ruined buildings of real stores (Hooters, White Castle) to this generic, colourless bland map in Homefront 2

Halo
In most games, there is a sense of grandeur - extreme and massive landscapes to create an awe inspiring spectacle. Multi maps are also heavily themed, with a real sense of uniqueness to each one. Not so in Halo 5, back to bland empty landscapes and multiplayer maps that are either generic streets or remakes of old maps.

Zelda being "open air" (whatever the fluff that's supposed to mean) is not my problem - if anything it should've gone open-world long time ago.
However, this particular implementation of it is what doesn't sit right with me - like I said several times in other threads, it reminds me of having (sometimes in the future) Souls open world game, with very little of Souls levels anywhere in the game.

If they keep it this way in the future - oh well, not the first (or most liked) IP I've decided to quit due to substantial changes I don't like, so no big deal really.

Then why are you complaining about it so much in so many different threads if it's no big deal? :P

More of the worst:

Bomberman

to

Madden NFL

to

Agreed. Overstrike looked interesting. The change to Fuse completely turned me off of the game.

And the downgrade Mighty No 9 got was pathetic and unnecessary.

Well, the reason is obvious. The Wii U and Switch aren't powerful enough to pull a game like that off. At least not without downgrades. Have to wait for Switch 2.  Though, if they make a Zelda that looks like that, maybe even as an OoT remake, I'd buy that probably Day 1.