How is having a challenging enemy a lack of freedom?

Git gud.

The enemy wasn't challenging though ... the weapon durability just made all my weapons disappear and the health bar was still so large. Had the weapons not had durability I would have been able to kill it quite easily, in fact I was pretty close. 

Then why didn't you finish it with bombs or arrows?

Sorry I wrote that in a confusing manner lmao. I said the "health bar was still so large" and then said "in fact I was pretty close" I think the health bar was about at the 35% point? The reason why I didn't use arrows is because I ran out of them. The reason I didn't use bombs ... well ... I did! But they did almost no damage. Remember, this is the first combat shrine I got to in the game, and it was also right in a beginning area, yet despite that I learned later that this was actually one of the strongest shrine bosses there is. I didn't have an upgraded bomb at the time and I was very close to beating it. Ultimately, it was boredom and the fact that the design was frustrating that made me stop trying ... I don't even think the enemies pattern was hard honestly. 

Ran out of arrows? I never farmed arrows during my entire playthrough and still never fell below 30. Honestly, it sounds like you're making this story up just to back up your opinion. 'I totally would've beating the strongest shrine boss early in the game. It was no trouble but that darned durability mechanic wouldn't let me win'. It's especially suspicious since there are no 'Major Tests of Strength' in any starting area.

I'm "fine" with weapon durability, I just don't think it's optimal. You are arguing as if I'm saying that freedom is a be-all-end-all argument, it isn't, I'm just mentioning it because it is very ironic and does conflict with the main point of the game. However it's more to it then that, it's that the consequence isn't very well thought out in how it affects the rest of the game. Part of that is "freedom", but another part of it is that it just isn't very fun. It isn't fun when you spend a large portion of the game looking at a poorly thought-out user interface because you have to switch between weapons, it isn't fun to have something other than skill dictate whether you win a battle or not in an action-adventure title, it isn't fun to stop in the middle of combat constantly. And what you keep misunderstanding despite me mentioning it over and over again, is that i'm not complaining about the fact that I died to a boss, because I didn't, but the fact that the game makes it nearly impossible to beat said boss. One is a consequence on the player, another is a consequence on what the player is able to do. I'm not arguing against the consequence of getting shred to pieces when you aren't prepared, I am however arguing against the inability to do something despite having the means to do it if not for an arbitrary "survival" mechanic.

You didn't address anything I said about why RE2 isn't an applicable example, and doubled down on the ammo point (even though people who are against weapon durability are not complaining about limited arrows, because, you know ... weapon durability and ammo limitations are not the same thing), again mistook this for an argument of whether a boss should be able to kill the player or not (when it isn't), and yet again didn't acknowledge the difference in design between both games that makes one acceptable and another unacceptable. I'm not going to repeat the points I already wrote about the same example more than once, either this example needs to be evolved or it shouldn't be used again. 

Mentioning RPGs isn't helping your case, Zelda isn't an RPG and you were the first person to use that as an example. 

I'm sorry but I find that a little bit of a silly justification for the weapon durability. You are literally linking exploits of the game to show the "depth" of the combat but then want to say that going to a dangerous area and picking up a high tier weapon is too much of an exploit and needs to be balanced. Huh? I mean ... I don't know about you but finding extremely powerful weapons  early on is one of the fun things you can do in open world games, and it works much better as a risk-reward mechanic then weapon durability. This would be especially true for a Breath of the Wild sequel, I mean it's the entire reason why Breath of the Wild videos are about all the cools ways you can exploit or explore the world. The answer to the balance issue is to just make it incredibly hard to get to. I honestly didn't find the area around the castle to be as dangerous as they were made out to be, if weapons didn't have durability i'd imagine that they would just make the area harder. This is an especially weird point because Breath of the Wild stands out as that kind of game where the designers often thought "Players want to do x? So be it. There's no reason to stop it". If Breath of the Wild was made by conventional developers, you wouldn't be able to climb nearly every surface, you would have to walk a very specific path up a hill, you wouldn't be able to beat the game whenever you want, you wouldn't be able to skip the beginning area, but you can do ALL these things because of the philosophy behind the game which apparently now needs to be "balanced out" with weapon durability. 

As for the videos, they're cool but they're not really what I'm talking about. Most of those are exploits, not really "mechanics" on their own. Others are incredibly easy to the point where I don't even know how this is used as an argument for "depth" ... you can throw a bomb and use a leaf to blow the bomb under the enemies weakpoint? Yeah, that's pretty obvious and I imagine a lot of people have done it, it's just something that isn't always easy to do depending on where you're standing in relation to the enemy as well as the game's physics, but it's not really "skill-based". You can hit an enemies weak point with the boomerang, even if the weak point isn't facing you? Uh yeah ... those kind of things are what boomerangs have been used for in Zelda games in the past too. Use a glider quickly before doing a falling attack? ... Isn't that kind of obvious? A lot of this can't even be done based in a shrine and is based on open world exploration, which conveniently is where you won't need to put much effort into combat 99% of the time (because the enemies are so easy). Whether or not you can execute these maneuvers is based a lot on where you're at, not your skill. And even in the video a lot of these exploits are mentioned by the video creator themselves as pretty much useless, as they aren't efficient for attack or aren't good compared to normal attack behaviors. 

The thing about Breath of the Wild is that, it's design is already very deliberate, which eliminates a lot of the reason for weapon durability already. I feel like in a lot of open world games nowadays don't do a good job of thinking about what items should be where or when the player character should gain which power. Breath of the Wild doesn't have that problem ... everything is already very deliberate about it's world design and where you get powerful items. This is a big reason why the weapon durability mechanic is already pretty unnecessary. Hypotheticals aren't good at making a point but I have to ask if Breath of the Wild didn't have this mechanic would people feel the need for it? And overall, I don't think they would. I don't think there would be a "missing link" between the feeling of catharsis you would get with or without weapon breaking, as there often is with so many games that are missing a necessary feature. If Breath of the Wild's sequel simply has more unique weapons, a more deliberate combat system, and a larger variety of enemies I honestly don't feel it would need weapon breaking as a reason to "balance" anything or to force the use of different weapons. 

But look, you do have good points and I don't disagree with everything you say. I just don't agree that any of it means weapon breaking is a necessary mechanic. However I don't have all the answers and I don't think everyone will be 100% happy with whatever decision is made. I do fear that without the mechanic survival elements would be less of a focus in the next game. However, I kind of think that weapon durability is over-stepping the boundary between "action adventure" and "survival" too much in favor of the latter, and simply focusing more on cooking or weather effects could make the next game more survival-based than BOTW already is without needing the durability system. I respect your opinion and I don't even think it would be a massive blow to have the mechanic return in BOTW2, or whatever they call it, especially if they tweak it some more. But currently while i'm not a hater of the mechanic, I'm not a fan, and I'd prefer if it weren't in at all. I don't expect others to agree with me but that's fine.

This is about everything I could possibly say on the matter, so obviously I probably won't comment on it more. At least not in essay format, lol. This is way too long. 

Whatever you say man. I'm not going to go out of my way just to make someone believe me, lol. 

I'm pretty sure I was talking about the Muwo Jeem Shrine near the Hateno Research Facility ... which is one of the first areas you go to the in the story. I got to the Hateno Village in only a few hours, and that's including a lot of time fucking around and not doing the story. It's a few minutes walk from the village, but it's pretty close and honestly I felt like it was a deliberate point of interest from where you stand in the research facility (it sticks out like a sore thumb because it's like a big branch formation sticking out at the sea). There you go. Either way, whether you like the example or not the point still stands. 

You do know the are in game shortcuts to switch weapons with out going to the interface right? If you don't manage and prepare yourself then yes you should be punished via the consequences as you didn't respect this aspect of the game that you're meant to manage and the game showed you whats up that's not on the game that's pretty much down to you that's the point it's not to everyone's taste but no game is, the game gives you freedom and makes it clear early on to manage these aspects as part of your freedom the design basically did its job. I didn't need to address RE2 as much because the context of the comparison is the same in the game the are areas with respawning enemies as you explore the areas you come across, the 3 main areas have quite some exploration to them, early in the game it's made clear that you have to manage your ammo and such otherwise you can simply run out and in that game you can't flee and come back later when a boss fight happens. What you're arguing here would be equivalent to someone going guns blazing then complaining they don't have the ammo to fight the bosses well that's the point it's part of the design, RE also ironically has durability with the knife as well.

I mentioned RPGS when comparing how forgiving BOTW is in allowing you to escape and recover from such situations, you are aware that a game's depth also includes exploiting mechanics in the games? DMC, Bayonetta etc... all of them skill is also knowing when to use what ever tricks you're capable of and BOTW's designed is a sandbox where you freestyle your approach based on your situation you're trying to limit what is classed as skill here it's not just deliberate combat as you're implying.

I'll reply to this because I don't think it will take much time to. 

The game didn't "show me whats up", that's my entire point. It just showed me that it will restrict what i'm able to do not because of skill level but because of a durability mechanic which impedes on what you're able to do without any real justification other than "resource management". You can have resource management in a game without it being tied to a weapon's durability. It's not like just because one of a game's primary focuses is resource management, that needs to be in every mechanic and aspect in the game. I feel like you keep repeating "resource management" and "preparation" to make it sound like it's just some high level concept I've yet to grasp. There are a lot of ways to incorporate the act of preparation or managing resources that don't include taking away your entire arsenal because one enemy has a lot of health, such as: making a variety of enemies which are specifically weak to one kind of item (preparation), making an enemy weak to one kind of limited resource (resource management), making elements other than enemies require specific resources or items to overcome (both resource management and preparation), etc. In fact, all of those are already elements in the game! So it's not like those two aspects would be removed just because of a lack of weapon durability. And again we aren't talking about Breath of the Wild so much as a hypothetical sequel of sorts - in which case I would want more focus on survival elements, without the weapon durability accompanying it. 

Yes, I was including the shortcuts when I was saying that the weapon switching wasn't that good. 

"What you're arguing here would be equivalent to someone going guns blazing then complaining they don't have the ammo to fight the bosses well that's the point it's part of the design, RE also ironically has durability with the knife as well."

No it wouldn't?  I know that you're a fan of weapon durability but goddang, you could at least admit the way it's done in Breath of the Wild is a little extreme! You're literally comparing someone wasting a ton of bullets before a boss fight to the point that they have no bullets left to fight said boss, to someone who comes with an entire arsenal of weapons only for all of said weapons to break because of a durability mechanic. They're not the same thing ... at all! One is practically having no weapons whatsoever, the other is having every weapon you could possibly carry and still having them all be null and void. Also, that isn't "ironic" in the slightest. Irony would be if I said that Resident Evil 2 was a great example for why BOTW shouldn't have durability mechanics, only for it to have durability mechanics. Or if I said that Resident Evil 2 and Breath of the Wild had no similarities. I didn't say either of those things ... all I said was that I don't think the two games are comparable to the degree that I would be persuaded by using Resident Evil 2 as an example. They have similarities but I don't think the example is very good, especially because you kept insisting on using bullets instead of knives despite supposedly knowing knives have durability(?). 

" you are aware that a game's depth also includes exploiting mechanics in the games?"

I could have sworn I wrote something akin to "don't get me wrong, these exploits are still a point in favor of Breath of the Wild's depth of combat" ... I REALLY could have sworn I wrote that. Probably deleted it when I was editing that huge thing. But yeah - I agree with you when you say that exploits are an important part of a game's skill curve, especially for traditional action games. However, all I simply meant was: A ) that a lot of those exploits are very specific to certain areas of the overworld and not the overall combat system B ) a lot of those are pretty easy to pull off (like idk how the ones I previously mentioned are "secret") or near useless (going by what the exploiter in the video says) and C ) that's not really what I was talking about when I said that a more in-depth combat system would make the next Zelda better. I mean sure, more complex exploits might make the combat more enjoyable and interesting, but I just meant that more fleshed out mechanics would be awesome for the next game. I will admit that upon rereading it, it sounds like I'm saying exploits aren't an addition to the depth a combat system has. I certainly didn't mean to imply that ... although again .. not what I'm talking about.