What they’re confused about is how it was deemed necessary to spend all that time and money on making a game look that good but not to do the same for the gameplay. It’s insane that they can make a world with such immense detail that most people probably won’t even see but don’t value the effort that would make it play well, something that everyone notices. It’s in the title, it’s about the dissonance.

You’re agreeing with the author of the article. They even point out pretty much exactly what you said when they said “How can someone look at this, this majesty, and say, “Hmmm, seven out of ten?” And then a guard sees me through a solid hillside and ruins fifteen minutes of painstaking stealth, and I wonder how it can be on sale at all.”

He is baffled by the focus of assets. Thousands of people from across the world came together to create these beautifully meticulous visual details, yet nobody bothered to make sure the game is actually fun to play.

Also, I know I'm going to be gunned down on this hill but BOTW is boring. I have tried again and again to get through that game and can't push myself beyond 10-15ish hours. It's like everyone that is raving about it has never played a basic open world game before. It has a cool physics system but that can't prop up the fact that the huge open world is just EMPTY and when you do finally find something to interact with it's either 1)One of 4 enemy types that you can either use the physics engine to cheese or just whack at using the most basic combat system imaginable (and you'll be punished for using with a broken weapon), or 2) an incredibly basic "dungeon" that involves 1-3 simple puzzles and maybe another boring fight.

To top it off the writing is absolutely atrocious, so you can't even rely on that to drive you through the mediocre gameplay. I just don't get it.

Breath of the Wild has a good art style though. Which helps with the low fidelity.

Unreal Engine 5 is going to enable many beautiful bad games

I personally wouldn't say "gameplay is the most important feature", but it's intertwined.

A game is a piece of art, and a piece of art passes a message or a sentiment to the end user.

Some don't need gameplay at all, like the novel-like games with eventual quick time events like Until Dawn, just nice graphics and an appealing story are enough to pass on what the creator wants.

Other games require heavy focus on gameplay, remembering enemiew behaviors and learning a plethora of items and skills so the player can even experience thee world around him, a good example would the Souls series.

There's even games in between, like Cyberpunk, where the graphics and storytelling are the most important aspect, and the gameplay is there but is not important enough to pass on the message. And vice versa.

The worst a game can be is "meh", or leave you uninterested on any of its aspects. Haven't played this SW game, but if I compare to the the SW works, the focus should be either good action (like Jedi Academy game) or a deep and interesting story and world building (like the Andor series). If the only thing It has is graphics, then I can see how uninteresting it can be.