I thought it already had happened but congrats!
I've yet to play the game tho.

There is something complex in BotW though. The way all of the systems interact. It leads to tons of emergent gameplay. No one element is too complex to understand, so people find all sorts of ways to combine different elements to do completely unexpected things. It's elegant in its simplicity. Much like real life, where seeming complexity emerges from elegant simplicity. It's why the game world feels so alive. Sorry, I agree with the rest of what you said here, just thought I'd add that. I think Nintendo knows what they missed in BotW, and I'm pretty hopeful the next game will be a sequel that reuses assets like MM did with OOT, and we'll get all the emergent gameplay of BotW with all the variety and interesting themes, and hopefully length, of other Zelda games.

It did officially, Nintendo said it was at 9.3m on Switch alone (shipped plus digital) since last month. And then there’s the WiiU version which is estimated at around 1.5m. Now though the Switch version has also passed OoT’s 7.6m here on VGC.

I've been a fan since LttP and I love pretty all of the games (only Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks excepted). I feel like even when things change like dungeons, atmosphere, story, and exploration, Nintendo still does an excellent job wherever they put the focus of the game. BotW is my favorite because the exploration has always been my favorite part and I loved wandering the landscape, enjoying the vista and always discovering something new and strange over the next hill. I liked the shrine and the Beasts, but I would have preferred some longer, thematically different dungeons. Hopefully we'll get those in the next mainline Zelda.

Another I hope for is that even though Nintendo has unified their software into the Switch, that they will still do 'handheld' Zeldas. Smaller games more in line with traditional Zelda tropes, since I don't want those to go away entirely even though I really loved BotW.

Good, because it's the best one.

For me, it was the first game in years that really felt like it was pushing gaming forward as a medium instead of just retreading an established formula with prettier pixels. It captured my imagination and gave me newfound hope for the future of video games.

Yeah I can think of a few ways; even greater range of interactivity, more enemy variety, the main dungeons and their bosses uniquely themed.

Somewhere new I reckon. I'd like to see more fantastical landscapes and environments, like in the Xenoblade games.

I didn’t mind Snowhead, myself, I actually found it enjoyable.

It was the Great Bay Temple that made me want to chuck my controller or 3DS through my bedroom window. Fuck that place.

Nintendo would need to vastly change Hyrule via another big time shift or a cataclysmic re-structuring of the land if they wanted to keep the game set there. The exploration and discovery were key to my enjoyment of BotW and retreading exactly the same ground would not satisfy me at all. I would rather they took Link somewhere new, or re-imagined another classic location like Termina, Holodrum, or Koholint Island the same way they did for Hyrule.

I got the game march 22nd 2017 and i am still playing it. Just today i have played 2 hours. Just wandering arround, looking for koroks upgrading my armor. Good to have my switch back.