Thoughts on Breath of the Wild, 110 hours in, 97 shrines, 140ish seeds, and main story completed:
Extremely impressed with the game design.
The extent of verticality and ability to climb any surface alone are fundamental changes how you think about approaching spaces and regions. Developers weren't hindered by having to constantly consider traversable terrain in designing the world, since every surface is already traversable. That allowed for a creation of a world with much more varied terrain and verticality than just about any other open-world game in the market. Fundamentally changes the nature of travel, and how you plan on approaching different places.
Breath of the Wild's physics engine contributes to this sense of free-roaming by connecting wildlife and the environment seamlessly into the adventure, without much immersion-breaking (save for the convenient poofs of dead animals into sliced meat and legs). Burning grass create updrafts you can use to get to higher elevation if your stamina is limited, for example. Shooting a fire arrow at a boar gives you cooked meat, which will slide down surfaces if they are too steep, and much, much more. Many of the games' puzzles utilize this extensive physics engine, and it feels completely natural and extremely well-integrated.
The story's structure is also extremely well-done, and contributes to the feeling of self-adventure. You alone decide when you are prepared to fight Ganon. The Divine Beasts are there to help you out and to give you a reason to care about the well-being of the world around you (Something that SS pitifully lacked).
I can go on, but there's a lot just between the points I've delineated that I haven't fully mentioned yet. There are hardly many other open-world games that manages to fit all of these together so well, to truly realize the freedom, seamlessness and interconnectivity of world design, physics, and story in such a package.
This game raises the standard of open-world game design to a whole new level. Having played plenty of others, I can never go back to them and feel as satisfied as when when I played Breath of the Wild. Where The Witcher 3 succeeds in creating a compelling narrative, Breath of the Wild succeeds just as much in creating a world worth exploring, worth getting lost for hours and hours in.
On a personal note, I'd also add that this game employs negative space extremely well. There are sections of grass that you can simply walk through for a bit all the while being able to truly take in the world around you, the nearby river, the forest or bridge nearby. The world is scenic from nearly every single viewpoint.
As a Zelda, the game leaves quite a bit to be desired. The game scraps the traditionally ornate and length dungeons for a myriad of physics puzzles in shrines, and the narrative is quite limited in scope. The direction and singular purpose of the game being made explicit is acceptable, what isn't acceptable is that most of the Champions' personalities are painfully limited, with not much to them.
I will 100% this game by completing all the shrines. Along the way to 120, I will find as many seeds as I can before I finally put the game down as a must-play. Will definitely revisit it from time to time, afterwards.
As of now, my list of best Zelda games are as follows:
1. A Link to the Past
2. Breath of the Wild
3. Majora's Mask
4. The Minish Cap
5. The Wind Waker
Maybe we'll get to re-meet the Zora and explore redesigned Vah Ruta, this time accompanied by Zelda herself
I'm worried that this might be the case. Sounds so lame, honestly.
I'd like something along the lines of an exploration segment of Hyrule 100 years prior, before Calamity Ganon's attack.
