We don't know yet. In BOTW you get experience points after beating an enemy, but the experience caps at the 10th enemy of a certain specie and color you kill. Special enemies and bosses give you more experience. I'd say you won't be able to get over blue and black minions without beating the temples first 

I love souls and blood.  I hated sekiro.  I couldn't get the system to ever click.  Never made it more than 30% in the game.  It is the only from software game I didn't love.  

Let me tell you, i felt the same. I hated the almost useless dodge and roll, and suffered with the need of constant parrys, but... I adapted, and Man, It feels good! Parry becomes mostly natural, and feels great, jumping and counters also start to come naturaly.

Sekiro is that game that takes a bit of time to master, but feels great once you get used combat is master class!

Sure, it isn't comparable as TotK doesn't deal with fuzzy logic, mapping unreliable gps data to unreliable road data with added dead reckoning using motion sensors to determine which road and what level of overlapping roads you're following while dealing with dynamic changes to the map, all while driving with added forward prediction to compensate for lag in gps data reception. Damn I wish it was as simple as the car is at X,Y,Z on road R pointing with direction included.
Maybe the user entered a parking lot, taking an exit in a tunnel (where there is no gps reception) is the user still following the route or are the motion sensors measuring straight travel. Quick reroute to the nearest gas station, is the overall route still valid or is there a better one now with timed restrictions / timed speed limits along the route.

Yep not comparable at all to a game where everything is known and you can simply pop up a loading screen or long falls to hide data loading.

However in scope, complexity, storage, it's all just manipulating data in the end. And TotK isn't tracking the physics of every tree. Physics simulation starts and stops with the user interacting with objects. Once objects stop moving they are no longer animated, just rendered where ever they ended up. Until some other active object or the user touches it. NPCs have simple routines, following set paths. Enemy AI is pretty standard from what I've seen so far. The amount of interactions you can do is the impressive part.

As a software developer I'm more impressed by FS2020, the whole world seamless (well minus the poles due to their legacy data structure) with dynamic real time weather (with turbulence, temperature, atmospheric pressure all affecting the wings and flight dynamics of the plane) dynamic traffic (all actual live flights are present in the game), boat traffic, cars, other players, some spots with wildlife, thousands of POIs and many photogrammetry areas integrated. All coming from different servers in real time. And it runs on a Series S!


And back to the topic, don't you think persistence could have worked in TotK with better hardware? (more RAM and/or more storage space) As I said before, just 1MB is enough to store the position and orientation of 47 thousand objects before compression. (And more if fused as then it becomes relative coordinates which take even less space to store) Gonna take a while to build that much!

I tried sekiro twice but perhaps third time is a charm

While you are correct that object permanence isn't exactly "hard" or "impossible", the data that is used would likely be moderately larger than you are suggesting. The reason why this isn't implemented is to reduce the bloatation of save files, something that Skyrim famously failed to do until they released the legendary edition and patched it. 

Lots of games use object permanence for SOME things, typically vehicles..sometimes enemies. Another thing is that while objects arent rendered, the data still has to be read quite constantly (e.g. approaching XYZ coordinate, read data for objects within that XYZ coordinate, call to draw objects for that XYZ coordinate and apply physical based attributes). This is why games that do have object permanence often have them fall from a short distance above the ground as you are approaching. It's just more taxing when the system resources could be (and are) better spent elsewhere. 

That said, I do wish TotK had a larger area to work with before objects disappeared. I went to chase a wheel that rolled away only for the whole wagon to be gone when I came back. 

I tried sekiro twice but perhaps third time is a charm

Your top 3 is now:

1. TotK

2. BotW

3. Souls 3

;) Nice. Looks like the graphics tech didn't phase you. Honestly I don't see why people are disturbed the game looks beautiful despite being limited by reasonably older tech.

I guess different strokes for different folks. Anyhow most of the internet seems very happy with the game, my feeds are flooded with totk stuff and I don't really have subscriptions to many such channels. I think op and other agreeing opinions is a very small and too vocal minority.

I always thought art style trumped graphics.