Game developers are blown away by Tears of the Kingdom

[HoloDust]

curl-6 said:

The Zelda killer title seems to stem from the lead up and launch of BOTW and Zero Dawn happening side by side; fans inevitably compared the two as ammo in the perpetual console wars, and at the time Sony seemed unstoppable with PS4 dominating the market and the Wii U failing miserably.

I can't find it now but we had an infamous thread here where someone predicted that Horizon would beat Zelda in both sales and reviews.

Of course, once the two games actually released, BOTW ended up being widely considered one of the best games ever made, while Horizon was considered merely a good game.

Horizon was mostly trying to copy success of Witcher 3, if memory serves me right, and they were fairly vocal about influence of TW3 on HZD's design - so far that CDPR made a slight jab at them, all in good spirit:

and GG returning the favor: