I agree with this. I don't see any game in 2017/2018 being as good as BotW except Sonic Mania and Sonic Mania Plus.
To me it's not that the game is even that great, but it's definitely the Mario 64 moment of the generation.
Paraphrasing the Girlfriend review of it, playing BotW makes you realize how constrained you are in other games, I can go back, enjoy all of them, but will forever wonder why doesn't the environment interact with spells or with the character, why the invisible wall, why I can't go everywhere at any time, why enemies don't react to environment, why the tree don't react to an explosion or why I can't approach some situation creatively, etc.
Following the Mario 64 example, it made Crash Bandicoot and every other 3D platformer released before obsolete, and even if you go to the Crash (or Croc, Tomb Raider, or whatever previous game) formula, and make a new expertly crafted game, that may be even better than Mario 64, as a game, like Crash 3 (I don't agree with this, but C3 is a great game on its own right), the game still feels outdated.
You can like Crash, you can like it more than Mario 64, it's a valid opinion, but you can't say the impact was greater, or that the games were more important.
That's what happens with BotW, it has problems, there are many open world games that are great, and some find better, but IMO, they are following an obsolete formula, because BotW changed the bar, changed the landscape of that genre.
I'm not even that huge BotW player, in my house we play Mario Odyssey much more (lots of kids), but the impact of the game is undeniable, and will become more and more apparent as time goes on.
This year, we didn't have any game that changed our revolutionized VGs like BotW. That doesn't mean they are bad games, this year we had tons of great games, much more than last year, but none like BotW, and if that has been released this year, it would have swept the GOTYs, no doubt.
