I really look forward to what the industry may explore now that devs are finally starting to take note of Nintendo again.

What I like about Tears of the Kindgom is that it is not only a never-ending bag of surprises, and skirts the edges of game-breaking mechanics without actually breaking, it also has something many other Nintendo games lack: an artistic and story direction that is catered to everyone rather than to just younger people, and this has been the case with most Switch games. This is what I argued for on this forum for a long time and I am glad to see that this is the new Nintendo, finally. And now people are starting to take note at the seriousness and respect this game commands.

Move aside big publishers, and make room for quality game experiences.

AI DMs would be my guess for the future of open world games (not a genre by a long shot, but games tend to be labeled as one).

Given their roots in original Dungeons and Dragons, I'd say this is THE holy grail, at least for people who like open world RPGs. Because, for all their openness, even the most open of the open world video games are terribly constrained in what they can do and achieve and are nowhere near to even the official campaign modules for, let's say, 5e DnD (and they are all pretty much average to bad) in scope or freedom. And if you take proper hex or point crawl campaign, with simulation of living, breathing world running behind the scenes, with all the factions involved and interactions that come out of all elements in play, it is more than obvious how much properly trained AI will bring to video game design of future games.
Add to this some kind of voxel or otherwise volumetric representation of the consistent world, where everything has properties and interacts with everything, giving permanent results (hence why voxels octrees or some similar technique) and there is completely new way of thinking about and designing games (i.e., when your wooden doors are just that, wood, and not artificially protected by your code, and you have a player with an axe that can chop through them, you have to start thinking about what stops them from entering every house there is in your game world).

The Wayward Realms is one of the games that set its goal to achieve at least some of that (first part, not the second about voxel alike based world). It is from people who made Elder Scrolls Arena and Daggerfall - so there will be no lack of the ambition or understanding the matter at hand, given how insanely ambitious Daggerfall was. Hopefully they will have enough financing to achieve what they've set for themselves.

I expect smaller teams with great ambitions will be at the forefront of these attempts, as they always were - people who played lot of tabletop RPGs and wanted to translate that to computer games of the time.

I wouldn't mind a pattern of a traditional 3D Zelda sitting in between the open world games especially if was done in a manner that meant more releases each gen and talking about the time between releases, the timescale for a new open world game along with the tricky position of upping oneself may well be why we have TOTK being a sequel.

This is subjective to each person though. You will learn that when you get older and work with more different types of people. Some people need visuals to absorb the information better, some prefer a meatie 10 page report. Graphics are no different as some people experience and learn via images so they will take the game in more.  Me personally I can't really tell the difference between smooth 30fps and 60fps as I have grown up on inferior frame rates so my ability to adopt is seemliness in my head.

@zeldaring 

Made some valid points about graphics perhaps not conveyed in the best way possible.

Granted gameplay will always be king, but developers do use it as a selling point especially for new franchises or franchise they are chasing full retail price on to try and win over the hardcore gamer who will then hopefully play it on their gaming channel and others will watch it and want to be like their idle.

Games that were mentioned like, Minecraft, well that started life as a free game. If it cost money (ie RRP) from day 1 it probably wouldn't have gotten as big. That relied on people trying out something that looked bad to find out it was awesome fun to play and spread the word via social media.

Games like FIFA, COD, GTA, do not need to have the best graphics because they have a competitive advantage (i.e. established franchises, lack of solid competition), but saying that they aren't slouches either.  At one point in time GTA used to set bars, so did COD when it was still in a battle against battlefield and FIFIA, well it has no competition as it's the only licensed football game.

So in the end it all comes down to who you are targeting and what competition you have will determine how much effort goes into graphics.

If you look at console software tie ratios:
https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Software_tie_ratio

You can kind of see that those averages are probably well below most people on this site. So what does this tell you? Hardcore gamers are far and few between and there is a significant portion of people who would buy 1-3 games tops in order those those average to be well below what most people would own on this site per console.

Just look at the top 50 PS4 game totals on this site as an example as it's large than current gen. Most not all those game I would argue are  leaders in graphics in their genres at the time of release or have no competition where they need to push boundaries i.e. FIFA.

Switch well that is just a Nintendo game fest other then a few bleeps. It is the only choice to play Nintendo games so if you want to play their games you really got no choice or say in the graphics. One could make an argument that these games are pushing the limits of the hardware so they are the best they can be on Switch. 3rd parties had a chance to get a few in the top sales, but when you release game codes, or carts with half a game that requires a download, they won't sell so well.

It would be interesting to see how these games would sell if hey had a more graphically powerful one on say PS5.

Sony has their Action/Adventure franchise and it's called Horizon. They sell fine but don't get the same critical praise. Even tho I don't value the TGA's myself it was kinda funny seeing it get passed up for every award for other games. Both times it got outshined by BOTW and Elden Ring as they offered better worlds to explore and do things in. They aim for high-quality visuals but the worlds have little in the way of interactivity. It serves more as a backdrop than an interactive world. Because of that, I find them kinda dull. Tho personally have many issues with HZD esp with the main character.

Yes, I agree, I also don't like the Aloy character either (and it seems many do not like her). The creation of this character seems to have gone a long the following line: 1. They wanted a female character because they are still in the minority as main characters and therefore you can shine if done properly which leads to 2. Lara Croft: They looked at her and wanted to take her popularity but make here "political correct", i.e. desexualize her which 3. led to the look she has. I don't want to go into the discussion if she's pretty or not. I just want to point out that they used many characteristics that simply make her boring, without rough edges. But yeah, to everybody his own taste. I think in general it's pretty difficult to make good female (main) characters because it's easy to fall into one of the 3 traps: Too sexualized on the one end, too buttoned on the other end and neither/nor in the middle (= boring). Interestingly, we don't seem to have a problem with dull generic male characters, we are just used to them from decades of movies, series and games.

Yea  alloy just looks lame to me. I would buy the game  day 1 if they had a different main character. they are even trying make kratos look weak and killed off the best character they had which was Joel  In one game cause he was too bad ass.

Haven't played Horizon myself yet, (may try the first one when me and my gf get a PS5) but yeah as examples of the AAA standard for games of this nature at their time of release, they serve as a useful baseline to demonstrate just what makes BOTW/TOTK so special, and why there's more to greatness than just graphical fidelity.

I wonder if those Ubisoft and Horizon Devs are praising it, when they were on Twitter bashing Elden Ring

While those things are cool and add to making the world interactive. What made BOTW special to me was the world and the way you explore it, and also how easy it is to navigate it and how land marks are very distinguishable with out much hand holding. I never really messed around with the physics that much, except in the shrines where they are needed.