Well, Zelda 1 is that type of game - it's open-ended exploration, it's just that you won't be able to progress after certain point if you don't get what you need. This gives players more structure and sense of progression and developers a way to control how challenges scale. Yes, it is a bit more restricted than "go anywhere, do anything from the start", but you can't actually go anywhere and do anything in BotW from the start either - there are still some steps you need to complete, even after you get down from plateau, if you want to actually go anywhere.

Zelda is not Minecraft, which is epitome of free-roam open world sandbox - and even Minecraft has prerequisites before you go off to "finish" it (AKA kill the Ender Dragon).

A huge part of BOTW's design though was that you didn't have to progress in a certain order or a particular way.

After the great plateau you could wander off in any direction to explore and progress freely without the game stopping you and saying "sorry, come back later." For example, you could do the 4 divine beasts in any order you wanted, or even go straight to Ganon. This freedom was central to BOTW, and messing with it would risk turning off the crowd that elevated it from a 3-8 million selling series to a 30 million selling series.

Yes, you could try to go to any Divine Beast - but you had to get into Gerudo Town first, or survive heat of Goron City...which in my book is gated progression, which I actually like - apart from that "one solution" to problem of getting into Gerudo Town, which I would be fine with in classic Zelda, but not in BotW.

There are ways to make gated progression seamless, interesting and non-intrusive and retain open ended exploration - from what I understand, in TotK you can't go directly to end, like in BotW, which is gated progression...and that is good in my book of Zelda. Now, if I could only play TotK without game forcing down my throat these new abilities...

Gerudo Town or Goron City don't force you to go somewhere else or do another dungeon first as both are immediately solvable.

The gated progression model of classic Zelda requires key items like the hookshot to progress through the game; this prevents players from exploring and progressing in the direction or order they wish and you'd run into areas where it's "go beat beat x temple then come back" which contradicts BOTW's open-ended design.

You may not like the physics stuff but it is integral to the new formula that people loved so much. Nintendo would be crazy to walk back on these elements after they helped bring the series to a level of success far beyond any prior entry.

Dont forget Super Mario Galaxy 2 reviewed as good as Super Mario Galaxy 1 despite lacking the "wow" factor, cause it was an amazing game and was better than the first one

I don't think TOTK will review as well as BOTW due to the high bar factor, what I mean is people didn't know what to expect in BOTW especially following prior games which had a different execution of adventuring in Hyrule with gated dungeons and such all we knew was that it was going to be fully open world, many expected it'd be like TP only with an open world and maybe some elements of recent games until that E3 started showing something different was on the way. Rather than the recent games of the times BOTW went back to the original NES game and focused on the free adventuring aspect of it and expanded on that in a way not really seen in any game using the concept of emergent gameplay rather than get item A to go to location B, like it or not it's a direction that caught everyone off guard, with TOTK people now have a rough idea of what's coming on a basic level at least we know emergent gameplay with some good level freedom is on the cards.

The game will still review well maybe 96 average or so but I'm not sure if it'll match BOTW but it'll be close.

Not really, you'll see

Also with the new sales update BOTW's total is now 31.5m.

It'll be difficult to get to the MK8 50M, even with the Switch having been sold 129 million times since its release, and Zelda 130 million games since its 1986 release. 

Btw, does anyone here please know how many times the Breath of the Wild DLC has been purchased, to know if Nintendo will release a Tears of the Kingdom DLC too?

9/10 times DLC for successful games are going to reap decent profit. The only thing that I think will determine TOTK DLC is their wider plans with the team (i.e do they want all hands on deck with a new Zelda) and creative direction. There's a huge window to re-release the game on the Switch 2, so I could see them doing a directors cut and a coinside it with a DLC package. But I also think that the length of development of TOTK and it being a direct sequel makes me think Nintendo will want to have it be a full stop on this era of Zelda. And not undermine that with DLC.

plenty of successful games like GOW and Mario Odyssey never received DLC