Check out some cool Zelda prints from artist Tom Garden:

Source

I wouldn't be so quick to label those who hold BotW aloft as either ignorant or inattentive. I think you can make a solid case for its exceptional qualities as an open-world experience.

I too have absorbed a great deal of Zelda titles and open-world games, and I am confident that it's the best of both categories.

There's nothing in BotW that's unique per se, but the way in which it folds together several different physical, chemical, mechanical, and general gameplay systems is extraordinary.

Think of the ways the player interacts with the game environment. Yes, there are the usual open-world staples, like the ability to delay the main quest and experiment with the surrounding sandbox, but there are also scores of intentional and unintentional gameplay scenarios created by realistic weather, complex artificial intelligence, chemical reactions, physical reactions, and Link's rune abilities -- magnesis, stasis, cryonis. Not only can Link change the environment around him, by interacting with flora, fauna, and inanimate objects (each of which has its own chemical and physical reactions), but he can stop the flow of time, freeze water, and manipulate metal objects. He can electrocute enemies in a lightning storm by throwing a metal sword into the fray. He can trick a Moblin into striking a Cuckoo, which will summon a vengeful swarm. He can use a leaf to propel a sailboat. 

Then there's the spatial freedom allowed by climbing, which is informed by friction/stamina and weather systems; and improvisational combat, dependent on weapon fragility/durability; and food preparation, which opens up many new avenues for experimentation.

I haven't encountered a game that unpacks all these different ideas and mechanics as masterfully as Breath of the Wild.

BotW is very fun sandbox game - but it's pretty average open-world game - and those two terms are something that many seem to confuse or even eqaute.

As I said earlier, people do tend to mostly praise it for its "fuck around" mechanisms - politely known as sandbox. Yes, some of its mechanisms are quite fun (until you try something like choping bokoblin tower and your axe goes through it like it doesn't exists and you realize how limited those mechanisms in fact are), yet I find something like Just Cause to be vastly superior as fuck around game. Why it's not rated higher and showered with praise? Because it doesn't have Zelda or any big IP coat of paint.

While many find some of those mechanisms enhancing the game, I actually find some of them detrimental - especially climbing in this form breaks the world design, that is already not so great to begin with. If anything, BotW is for me perfect example of how loosely intertwined mechanisms, world design and character abilites can actually ruin open-world game, making it fuck around game.

And, IMO, Zelda should not be fuck around game - exploration, yes, by all means...and that is where open-world should come in - a well thought out open-world, designed to properly  accomodate for exploration, puzzles and story. Nintendo only needs to look a bit further in the past for some games and take some notes from them and build on it, instead of being mostly influenced by more modern designs (Just Cause included) and making mishmash of what current mass-market expects.

Listen, I get that you want a Zelda game in the Ocarina/Wind Waker/Twilight Princess mold—I too love that formula—but you’re not exactly engaging with or disproving my point. I spent a long time explaining how the game is special, and you just dismiss it all as a “fuck around” game. 

Can you point to an open-world game that does what Breath of the Wild does, in terms of emergent gameplay and environmental manipulation? Please do so, because I’d love to play it.

I think you're too fixated on the idea that BotW is something very special and that "other" games should do exactly the same things that BotW does - you can take quite a lot of games and turn it around, and BotW will not pass that check. However, I'll play along - I find BotW to mostly be a mishmash of FarCry (FC 2 is pinacle of how enviroment reacts, no other FC game after it had it at the level of details FC2 had), and Just Cause - JC is probably king of let's fuck around, with destructable enviroment, great physics, paragliding and zipping to anywhere. These two IPs have been contantly popping into my mind while I was playing BotW.

And yes, for me, BotW indeed boiles down to fucking around, cause rarely any of those mechanisms is actually very usefull, apart for occasional...well, fucking around...which is not bad per se, I like fucking around in JC, it's just not what I want from Zelda.

And no, I don't want old formula, anyone that has ever been in any Zelda thread that I posted in, know what I think of Aonuma and his fixation on puzzles...and yet, I like puzzles, I always have, since all the way back in time, 80s and 90s, when they were quite common in CRPGs and dungeon crawlers. But he unbalanced Zelda so much with them ever since OoT, and now he swung it the other way, forgetiing meaningful puzzles in the process, instead making it about meaningless exploration in largely empty world - because, without fucking around, that what's BotW boils down to, given that there are only 4 beasts you need to go to (and even that is optional) and almost no significant story to follow.

What I would actually want is meaningful world with attention to details, and not the size, built for exploration, both horizontally and vertically (there's down, undergroung, as well, but seems they forgot that in BotW) crossed with "old mold" puzzles. Or if I'm crossbreading games, Twilight Princess mated with, let's say, Dark Souls (if I said Severance: Blade of Darkness no one would understand) all put together in the world that has world building philosophy of Gothic 1/2.

And no easy climbing - the most annoying thing for me in whole BotW, apart from lack of dungeons/shrines, is climbing, given how easy it breaks the world - such skill that Link is showing in BotW should never come at low price, and that should be one of character defining traits, for which he should suffer in other skills - but then we're in proper RPG domain, and I'm talking TES: Daggerfall/Morrowind amount of skills, and I'm not so sure Nintendo wants to push Zelda into full RPG, especially old school RPGs that draw so much from D&D.

I've played those games you're mentioning not one of them does what BOTW does in its execution they're not even close and at most cover only one or two aspects in BOTW, what's ironic is you're saying that he's fixated on something yet in your argument you're clearly fixated on one aspect of BOTW and focus purely on that to try and argue your stance. BOTW's freedom is not just in its sandbox elements it's the only game that literally allows you to play not only the main game but also situations how you want and you know this because you often try to pass that off as a negative like you do in this post when it's far from one, it's not world breaking it's absolute freedom that's the whole point of the design even Aonuma said the world is built as such that's what BOTW brings to open world games it's amazing you can't grasp this, the world is very much meaningful.

Some example are how if someone is struggling with a puzzle they can do a host of different tricks to solve or even bypass it, how all the enemy and boss fights have a number of tactics to deal with them only limited by your own creativity and execution, how if you can't reach a location by normal means you can find an alternative way to get there etc... That is what actual freedom of play is not the limited play as you want claims we hear in other games and it ends up being only 2 options of play with no room for out of the box thinking. Why BOTW does this? Because that's how an actual adventure would play out the adventurer using what's at their disposal to continue going on, the result is BOTW fully plays out like how the player chooses to freely approach the game whether as a story based game, sandbox, speedrun, combat focused etc... it's not just messing around as you put it and even the messing around aspects have practical applications in the game unlike other games.

Yeah, and as I said, BotW does not do things that those game do - and that what fixated on what BotW does as something that other games need to live up to be compared to BotW means...in case you didn't understand it...yet you did just that.

If you refferring to me passing climbing as negative - I do, and always will, at least while it's implemented in this form - that is not freedom, that's is someone in Nintendo being enamoured with freeclimbing. Freedom in playing that way is playing Daggerfall or Morriwind (or D&D) and putting points into climbing/acrobatics and then being able to go to areas that are not available to other builds, or tackle the problem differently due to ability to go around some areas. BotW climbing is piss easy to do, especially with infinite amount of renewable resources that translate into potions, and breaks a game so much that by the time you get to the Hyrule castle you can skip most of it (which I did, wanting to finish the game as soon as possible, since it bored me toward the end that much) - for me, that is just poor design.

Admittedly, I fucked around in BotW for first 10 or so hours - then, when novetly grew old, I never used any of those so praised mechanisms ever again in the game - cause it was such a waste of time with no real purpose - unfortunatelly, I had to climb, cause it's just impossible to skip that at certain points in game. At least Bethesda was so curtious to not require you to play with power armor ever in FO4, with that idiotic choice to give it to you at the beginning of the game.

But to each its own - what many people consider great design, I consider rather poor solution to replace old formula.

I think you're too fixated on the idea that BotW is something very special and that "other" games should do exactly the same things that BotW does - you can take quite a lot of games and turn it around, and BotW will not pass that check. However, I'll play along - I find BotW to mostly be a mishmash of FarCry (FC 2 is pinacle of how enviroment reacts, no other FC game after it had it at the level of details FC2 had), and Just Cause - JC is probably king of let's fuck around, with destructable enviroment, great physics, paragliding and zipping to anywhere. These two IPs have been contantly popping into my mind while I was playing BotW.

And yes, for me, BotW indeed boiles down to fucking around, cause rarely any of those mechanisms is actually very usefull, apart for occasional...well, fucking around...which is not bad per se, I like fucking around in JC, it's just not what I want from Zelda.

And no, I don't want old formula, anyone that has ever been in any Zelda thread that I posted in, know what I think of Aonuma and his fixation on puzzles...and yet, I like puzzles, I always have, since all the way back in time, 80s and 90s, when they were quite common in CRPGs and dungeon crawlers. But he unbalanced Zelda so much with them ever since OoT, and now he swung it the other way, forgetiing meaningful puzzles in the process, instead making it about meaningless exploration in largely empty world - because, without fucking around, that what's BotW boils down to, given that there are only 4 beasts you need to go to (and even that is optional) and almost no significant story to follow.

What I would actually want is meaningful world with attention to details, and not the size, built for exploration, both horizontally and vertically (there's down, undergroung, as well, but seems they forgot that in BotW) crossed with "old mold" puzzles. Or if I'm crossbreading games, Twilight Princess mated with, let's say, Dark Souls (if I said Severance: Blade of Darkness no one would understand) all put together in the world that has world building philosophy of Gothic 1/2.

And no easy climbing - the most annoying thing for me in whole BotW, apart from lack of dungeons/shrines, is climbing, given how easy it breaks the world - such skill that Link is showing in BotW should never come at low price, and that should be one of character defining traits, for which he should suffer in other skills - but then we're in proper RPG domain, and I'm talking TES: Daggerfall/Morrowind amount of skills, and I'm not so sure Nintendo wants to push Zelda into full RPG, especially old school RPGs that draw so much from D&D.

Whether or not you enjoy the game is immaterial. You asked me why I though BotW set a new standard and I responded, "I'd say BotW set a benchmark for open-world games in terms of physical/mechanical/chemical freedom, locomotion options, and emergent gameplay." I then elaborated upon it and provided several examples.

You've done nothing to disprove that. 

I've played Far Cry 2 and love it--I imagine I'm one of the few who does. I also adore Morrowind and while I'm not fond of Just Cause (mission design is a weak spot) I appreciate the amount of mayhem you can cause courtesy of the grappling hook. But I'm sorry: none come close to the level of complexity of Breath of the Wild.

It just seems like your distaste for the BotW (and the critics and consumers who love it) is blinding you to the extraordinary qualities of the game. Again, you don't need to enjoy them, you don't need to want them replicated elsewhere, but you can at least recognize their significance.

Well, I'm not so sure how much your examples prove your statement compared to other games that have those mechanisms, and I already gave you one example to disprove it - actually, that was my very first disappointment with BotW - after being able to destroy full size tree, I sneak up to bokoblin tower and swing the axe - nothing happens. I try to set it on fire - nothing happens. I try to blow it up - nothing happens. That alone told me quite a bit about underlying mechanisms, at least when it comes to physics. Try that in JC3 - they fall - hard. On overall, I find JC having much more going on for itself as sandbox than BotW, especially when it comes to destruction and traversal, among other things. Maybe that's the thing though - after playing JC3, BotW felt too samey in lot of ways with some of its mechanisms.

Admittedly, that is not bad per se - yes, there are indeed mechanisms that work in BotW - and that are somewhat fun to use - occasionally. Yet, what's left of the game when you don't amuse yourself with them is fairly empty world, mostly devoid of meaningful exploration, with often very questionable designs, that are sometimes borderline lazy. I don't care much about JC to actually care much what's beyond sandbox, it's all silly fun for me there. I do care however about Zelda and what's beyond its sandbox.

I'm honestly quite surprised that you love Morrowind so much and think that BotW is better open-world game - though, they are very different games, and realistically they cannot be compared - but, apart from those "fun" mechanisms, BotW pales compared to it in almost every other aspect. But I'm guessing, those mechanisms mean that much to you - which is fine. For me, in this shape at least (that is, partially incorporated), they are quite low on the list of important things for open-world games. And even lower on list of important things for a Zelda game.