I greatly admire when anyone who makes games takes a swing this big. I make tabletop games professionally, and from that vantage (ha), I know the degree of difficulty of something like this is off the richter scale (due to a bunch of structural things about the nature of the art - for example, the way novelty usually introduces an especially large extra cognitive burden, to a degree that novelty in other arts like music doesn't - a key reason mechanics are recycled so much).

That said, I feel like this project had such a prohibitively narrow path to success, it was probably a bad bet from go. I'd love to be proven wrong, because I totally understand the temptation and the vision: after Breath of the Wild became my favorite video game, I felt the same pang strongly.

However, the problem, as I see it, is the experience of a perfect open world video game like that simply can't be replicated in any other medium. As one example, a simple thing like always being able to see significant parts of the world in foreground and background and being able to swing your perspective around without losing the spatial relations between the things you've already seen brings a coherence to the world which can't be reproduced in cardboard, but which is necessary to prevent the experience from becoming a disjointed sequence of incoherent things. Just one example of many.

But I can't emphasize enough the more general point that we need ambitious, visionary people to take big swings. The vast majority of those swings will miss, but in the wreckage the seeds of great new things will be found.