Where Horizon ZD fails

[pokoko]

BraLoD said:

Goodnightmoon said:

You can't see the difference between a map with invisible walls inside and a map with not a single invisible wall outside the very edge of the world? Ok then

And the bold part is actually a huge difference that shows how much better designed as an open world one of them is. 

Horizon doesn't have invisible walls inside, it has story based events, you can go everywhere while playing the game, you'll get to walls when going on the edges of the world. The bold and the first part are the same, it's not better design, it's different design.
Horizon doesn't exist in a rectangle as you said Zelda does, and Horizon has a much greater focus on the story, while still proving an open world to be explored when you want to.

Zelda is not better designed than Horizon because of that, maybe it is better designed, but not because of that.

This is what makes me scratch my head.  Looking in from the outside, it seems obvious to me that the two games had different design objectives.  Unless I'm mistaken, Horizon seems to have a more linear, story-based progression system.  It's perfectly fine to prefer one or the other but it feels silly to attempt to prove that one is "better".

Games don't have to use the exact same design.

One of my favorite franchises of last generation, Borderlands, used a semi-open approach and it worked very well.  I have no interest in trying to prove it was or was not a better approach to building a game world than, say, Skyrim.  All I care about is that both games were enjoyable.