I was mostly joking about PSO2, but it did kind of remind me of watching the teaser trailer for the Retem region that's coming in the update next week:
EDIT: Although, I just remembered that I think I saw someone mention offhandedly recently that the Sonic Frontiers project pilfered some of the devs from PSO2/NGS, but I don't know how true that actually is. I'm thinking it seems kind of possible that the field designers potentially already finished the first four NGS regions a while ago, and hopped on over to Sonic Frontiers, though.
BotW comparisons confuse me a little bit. Reminds me more of Shadow of the Colossus, personally. I'm very curious about how they're intending to make this more open world theme into a Sonic game.
I'm pretty excited to see what it's about, and if it ends up not being great, so be it. Not that big a deal. (Easy for me to say; It probably would be a pretty big deal for Sega, but--.)