People really need to learn what is engine and what it does. First of all somebody mentioned to me earlier that BOTW engine uses Havok Physics so from the start BOTW physics are not something that other games don't have because Havok Physics is popular middlware that many engines and games are using for physics. So it is simply design decision to spend hardware resources on physics related gameplay and not on something else (like drawing crowds of 100s of people). And as i said many devs choose to use Havok or PhysX middleware for their engine or Euphoria that is far more advanced movement engine that drives games like GTA IV, RDR or most recently Quantum Break.

I'm not saying GTA5 isn't impressive; as far as my own understanding of game tech goes (I am not an expert, but I read about it a lot) what it accomplishes on PS3/360 is a borderline miracle in terms of how much complexity it pushes while still maintaining a high visual bar for the hardware.

As you say, the games are very different; BOTW is supposed to represent a world where only a few small communities remain, so it never sets out to create the kind of bustling metropolis we see in GTA5.

As for Kakariko, it should be noted that while it may not seem terribly complex on the surface, its demands in terms of NPCs and the increase in draw calls for all the various objects and props are being added on top of all the other stuff that BOTW is running in the background, like the wind simulation affecting everything from particles to vegetation to clouds, streaming data in and out of memory, etc. There's a lot going on under the hood that may not look impressive on the surface but takes up a lot of processing time.

I think this is exactly my point it's impossible to look at 2 different games and engines, 2 different a goals and say which is factually more impressive  unless one clearly blows one out of the water so it's subjective unless thw differnce is big. None of us have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of each engine or the complexity of their inner structure. My argument is it's subjective, but permalite act like his view point is factual that's what the main arument about. 

I just booted up BOTW and red dead for on on my latop and you can clearly see red dead has way more detail much better quality shadows every where, but of course zelda is has more interactivy but holy shit does red dead look beautiful on switch, so which one is technically more demanding is always gonna be subjective.

i'm blown away how good this looks

Red Dead is a great looking game, but so is BOTW.

BOTW does push a lot of demanding effects not present in Red Dead, like individual polygonal blades of grass and dynamic particles.

It's been a long time since I played Red Dead so I can't remember what it's solution for reflections was, but from memory I don't think it had a global illumination system or volumetric lighting like BOTW does.

I'm pretty sure Red dead has it as well. all you have to is watch the 24 hours cycle just to see how impressive it is and they are techically faked unless using path tracing. you can watch 24 cycle hour cycle and keep on eye on the calcualtions red dead seems to be doing way more and the quality of the shadows are much higher and cleaner. Botw is a beautiful game as well but imo red dead at 1080p easily has it beat like i just played both  back to bacl to compare. rockstar are gods when it comes to graphics tech. textures work seems to be much better in red dead when you compare sorroundings as well.

Pemalite would know better than me, but by eye I'm not seeing any global illumination or volumetric lighting in Red Dead; it's 7 years older than BOTW after all and these techniques weren't as commonly used back in 2010.

Keep in my mind it's a low tier implementation that not very convincing thats why most people didn't even know it was even there. The developer who made the article about botw says they look complex but they are not and very efficient.

RDR looks meh to me. Just 7th gen brown game to me. I know Old West but I have been many times to Southern Utah even to some Old West ghost towns. It's more colorful than that. Not just color either but everything I see is just good for it's time 360 game yup. Which is fine for that 19-year-old console but it looks nothing special now at all. BotW is going to hold up longer than RDR did.

Here is my main point of why you can't judge hardware with different games and engines from a developer.

BOTW's engine is considerably more advanced than Xenoblade X's. However, just because a game engine has a more advanced feature set, it doesn't automatically guarantee that hardware can run a less advanced engine better

Case in point, even though it's not as feature rich XBX still has a lot of processing pouring into the wildlife routines. You can also fly anywhere on the map at a greater speed than you can glide in BOTW. Geometry rendering and object elements drawn in far distances can occasionally be more complex in XBX. None of these things are feature rich, but they a cost all the same.

You can apply this also gtav and red dead each one is doing different things personally. I think GTAv is much higher level then all of them for obvious reasons.

Makes sense since you hate realistic graphics  maybe it cause I'm playing on 14 inch screen but I'm also playing botw but it looks amazing on my laptop. Show me a Pic with something as detailed as that house I with horse and textures in botw ot really doesn't come close but it's also not fair comparing different art styles.