BOTW definitely deserves a lot of praise, and it was indeed showered with it back when it came out.

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2023/05/breath-of-the-wild-ranked-best-game-of-all-time-by-some-devs-and-critics/

https://www.gamesradar.com/were-all-talking-about-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-developers-explain-how-its-shaping-the-future-of-games/

https://mynintendonews.com/2017/06/04/game-developers-explain-just-how-influential-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-is/

Nintendo made a lot of smart choices in building on the foundation of BOTW, but that doesn't diminish how impressive it is that TOTK took an already very complex framework and constructed a whole extra game's worth of even more demanding complexity on top of it without it all coming crashing down.

Fair to say Nintendo got the most out of the X1 SOC than anyone ever has or will. This makes it exciting what Monolith with Xenoblade and Nintendo with Zelda will do with a more powerful chip in Switch 2.

Pretty much, while there were games that pushed the X1 hard from other developers (the likes of Witcher 3, Dying Light, Bright Memory Infinite, Doom Eternal, Crysis 1/2 Remastered, and FAST RMX come to mind) the most impressive first party games are borderline miraculous for what's now an eight year old mobile SoC.

Obviously, better graphics don't necessarily mean better games, but it's still gonna be interesting to see what Nintendo and co decide to do with their first generational leap in power since the Wii U.

Like I said the TOTK praise is well deserved, but BOTW being open world meant it was pretty much a new slate for Zelda games compared to past 3D Zeldas and to me what we have seen with TOTK is the ideas and experimental nature being continued and fine tuned.

It's not as big a change to the formula as BOTW was, but to be honest I think that's a good thing; there was so much potential yet to be explored in the new format, it would've been a shame to move on from it after only one game.

Still, I would argue it's just as impressive an achievement as BOTW, to take all the systemic complexity of its predecessor and add a whole new level of freeform complexity on top of that with Ultrahand.

Makes me worried how long its gonna take to make the next Zelda. With how long TotK took, considering all it was keeping from BotW, building a brand new next-gen looking world as big or bigger than the BotW/TotK world, with presumably a whole new slew of gameplay features makes me think its gonna take almost 10 years to build lol. The next Zelda might barely even hit next gen before the next next gen starts.

I hope they are already in the planning stage for the next Zelda game.

For this reason I could actually see them releasing a remastered TotK early next gen just to give a sort of next gen version of TotK to play while gamers have to wait the entire generation for the next Zelda to come out.

It's hard to know due to totk development likely being slowed to some degree by covid and It's impossible for us to know exactly how much covid slowed development down.

Well, to where can you go after open world (a question in general not just for Zelda)? To make even bigger worlds? I think people are already tired of too big open worlds. The biggest innovation will be AI (but maybe less for Nintendo) even more physics, better graphics as always... . Maybe down the road someone really finds a completely new way of how to play a game. We just can't imagine it right now. Nintendo would probably be at the forefront of such innovations. But a complete different way to play a game automatically means it can't be done with traditional controllers/joy-cons, so VR? I doubt VR will ever be a mass market product (also AR).

Honestly, I don't think it's farfetched that in future we play our games with our brain, meaning diodes are connected to our brain and we just "think" to move and act with the character. But before such a technology is possible I think AI will know from our private information we give them (Email, social media, notes, private files we give them access to, etc.) how our personal perfect game should look like and they will form this game out of an existing base game, several conditions can be applied of course.

My fear is that in the foreseeable future we don't get out of the loop I personally call "Machete - Machete Kills - Machete Kills in Space" which stands for "Open World, so exciting, what we do next? Well, we make it bigger, more vertical (into the sky and underground); great, but what we do next? Well, we leave Earth and go into space!"

I still can remember when we had those old (western) RPG's (Wizardry for example) and Adventures (all of them) where we only had static pictures and accompanying texts which told the story. The whole word was built in our heads and back then I always thought, how great it would be if we actually could move to that distant castle we see on the picture, if we actually could move around freely in this fantastic world... . Well, nobody could have known back then that all that will become a reality. But you know what? I don't think the experience back then was lesser than what we perceive now with open worlds in high end graphics. Maybe, innovation doesn't necessarily mean progress, maybe one solution can also be regress? I philosophical thought.

It's definitely a concern, and I very much doubt we'll get the sequel to Tears of the Kingdom before 2029.

It is worth remembering though that covid hit Nintendo really hard, so TOTK possibly could've been out in 5 years rather than 6 if not for the pandemic.

EDIT: Oops, didn't see this had already been addressed, my bad.

Nintendo have definitely put themselves in a tricky position where the pressure to constantly one up themselves with games as mind blowing as BOTW and TOTK is going to be enormous.

Still, they were already in this position when making TOTK yet managed to deliver. 

 Zelda is pretty flexible as a franchise. Same E3 they showed a trailer for LA remake and how cute it was and the tease for ToTK with how frightening Gannondofs corpse was. They can make something that doesn't have to one-up Totk in scale just a new mechanic. Tho yes that alone can be tricky but they often seem up to the task. If they have some form of RT in Switch 2 they can find a creative mechanic around that and story reason.  Not worried about them finding a new idea.

I would like one thing from the BOTW Hyrule before they move on tho. Hyrule rebuilt and get to visit Hyrule Castle and Castletown in a nice state. Now that both games deliver on the surreal end-of-the-world aspect.