By the way on the topic of "old vs new" formula for Zelda ... definitely feel like a lot of fans are being very disingenuous. It does not have to be one or the other. Quite frankly, Nintendo nearly threw the baby out with the bath water. There are parts of the "old" (read: after Zelda 1 but no one remembers that BOTW is using Zelda 1's formula) that were really great and absolutely COULD have been in BOTW. An impactful story, great puzzles, amazing dungeons. They didn't have to make it so that a large portion of shrines were uninspired, they didn't have to make the story feel so ... unimportant, they didn't have to make the dungeons mediocre (although yes, their gimmick is pretty amazing and Gerudo's dungeon is almost great).

There's just too much old vs new, fan vs fan shit going around: and a lot of it comes from each side not admitting that the other has a point.

If you payed attention, you wouldn't skip my examples. Again:

- you can chop and bomb trees, yet you can't chop and bomb Bokoblin towers
- lighting is just hilariously bad - it will ignore obvious targets, like towers and tall trees and go for you
- burning things is limited - try setting even usual tree on fire
- powering raft with leaf or magnesis trick - sorry, that's not how physics work
- pretty much all runes work only on preset objects, thus in no way they behave like they would if game has proper physics/destructibility

As for exploration, I don't know what games have you been playing, but it seems you haven't been paying much attention while playing:

Morrowind - http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Locations_(Morrowind)
Might and Magic VI - http://www.the-spoiler.com/RPG/New.World.Computing/might.and.magic6.3/mm6.htm
Might and Magic VII - http://www.the-spoiler.com/RPG/New.World.Computing/might.and.magic7.2/MM7.HTM

And no, shrines do not replace proper dungeons, especially since they always give same reward.

You can argue all you want how your opinion is objective, but, it's just that, an opinion - what might be working and is cool for you, might be broken and flawed for me, and vice versa.

And Bethesda dropped that system cause they went mass market with Oblivion, and full retard with Skyrim. Stat based systems are staple of RPGs and they should be staple of action-RPGs as well (it's just how you implement them, shamefully, every NBA2K has better stat to gameplay implementation than any action-RPG) - as someone who's been playing RPGs since mid 80s (and D&D before that), I tend to think about myself as of someone who knows a thing or two about them.

Yeah, they should've made game with great dungeons (proper 3D Zelda dungeons) and great exploration (that's were classic CRPG dungeons come in handy). A game that fixes Aonuma's designs, not scrapping it completely.

Amount of bad things I have to say about Aonuma's Zeldas is fairly comparable to BotW - but this is only Zelda I got bored with and had to power through it to finish...unsatisfying one, if I might add.

- Trees are needed to be turned into a resource, wood, this is very likely a decision made to not make the player lose out if a fire starts near by and they need wood.
- Lightning targets metallic objects as priority even on enemies this is established early on so the game is working fine on this one.
- You can chop down certain watch towers as well as shown in the video.
- Guess what the Leaf and Magnesis are magical items that manipulate forces in the world.
- Show us magical abilities in the real world please.

These aren't examples of the game not working these are just you trying to find any old nitpick sorry but this isn't even close to a rebuttal and yes shrines do replace dungeons as getting an upgrade is better then getting an item that is used only in it and nowhere else, evn the beasts give you abilities that have use for the player throughout the whole game, prior games only 3-4 items would ever have much use else where in each game. I was paying much attention mate you can go through Morrowind for a while and not find anything notable.

Bethesda didn't go full retard they realized that that system doesn't really work going forward, stats are a part of rpgs but many rpgs from Tales, Dark Souls, The Witcher do not result in the following memes when your stats are low.

This system sorry was never going to get far today, stats do not mean that player input should be overrided entirely.

I’m with Wyrdness and the others on his side in this curiously long ongoing debate about whether or not BotW sucks but, I do have to say that I agree with the statement that BotW’s shrines aren’t real substitutes for ‘old-style’[sic] dungeons. They also aren’t supposed to be, but the Divine Beasts, fun as they are, don’t really scratch the itch either.

It’s the only real criticism you could give BotW, without resorting to nitpicking. Old-style dungeons could have had a place in the game, they could easily have been optional and they could easily have held old-style items. For example; one could have contained the Hookshot. I read about how the developers try to find ways to implement it before scrapping it, but as far as I’m concerned it could have just been a tool to help with climbing and something that reels in other stuff. Like it could just be used to propel yourself further up a cliff or be an aid to climbing in the rain or on a smooth surface. I think having such optional but helpful items would be enough incentive to explore an optional dungeon.

An example actually exists in the game; Hyrule Castle. You could skip it, but I’d want the best shield in there is so it’s better to not. Granted it’s not exactly old-style because it lacks puzzles or a central mechanic, and it would be hard to add those in a satisfying way in such a super non-linear dungeon.

All I see here mount to poor excuses to justify those mechanisms not working as if they were properly implemented in the first place, instead of being limited to certain objects and certain scenarios. And that's my very point - all those mechanisms are not properly implemented.

- Trees should burn - all trees, not just preset objects
- Lighting does not behave like that at all - it's one of, if not the most stupid thing in BotW
- Yes, you can chop and bomb certain towers...that are on trees...yet first thing you encounter, Bokoblin towers, are apparently made of Vibranium and phased, so axes and other weapons go through them
- Leaf and Magnesis defy action-reaction in one type of scenario, and in others they don't? Oh dear, really great mechanism. I call that poor implementation.

BotW is not physics based game, only certain things in its world are allowed with little physics that it has in it, and other things even don't behave as they should behave. That is, again, what I call poor implementation. For some they might be amusing, for me they are cheap thrills that cannot replace all the things that BotW is lacking in.

Bethesda indeed went full retard, at least when it comes to dumbing down TES. On the business side, they are very smart and know that money is in mass-market. And proper CRPGs are not mass market genre.

The game was built for the Wii U, a system running a 1.24GHz Tri-core PowerPC 750 CPU, essentially an overclocked triple core Gamecube processor. Obviously this limits the sheer quantity and complexity of interactions that can take place.

And yet, in what other game out there can you set a bear on fire and ride it through the forest setting bushes and grass alight as you go? Or shoot a bomb arrow at an enemy causing an apple tree nearby to fall and its apples to be roasted in the fire, and then use the updraft of that fire to take flight and rain arrows down on your enemy from the air?

That thrill of discovery when you find a new way to interact with the world is as much a part of the core gameplay as conquering Shrines or finding the hidden memories. to call it pointless is as inaccurate as calling the story pointless in The Last of Us or Bioshock, or the sidequests pointless in The Witcher 3.

BOTW's physics are not meant to be totally realistic; you can use a giant leaf to fan your sail boat along after all, like the graphics, the physics are supposed to be exaggerated and stylized. 

All i see is a poor argument that attempts to nitpick.

- Trees give a certain resource the player could require at any time so making them not burn is obviously for player convenience.
- Lightning in BOTW is not meant to behave like in the real world you have no argument here.
- Yeah and? Again no real point here.
- I call this point reaching for the hills because the game isn't trying to be 100% like real life you're complaining about magical items doing magic things for god sake.

BOTW is a physics based game it's has physics implemented in its design for players to play around with want to know how hard you're trying to reach with this argument it's the one game with the most interaction with physics and open world to the point your argument hinges on not comparing it to another game but to real world physics, a game that is sci-fi fantasy and the complaint is well in the real world blah blah that flat out says it all, do you complain that in Star Wars the Force defies real world law as well?

No Bethesda simply utilized a system that was more practical not that debacle.

That's like saying, in what other game can you grapple the passing car and tie the other end to the enemy and watch him/her be dragged along the road. Or set fuel tank on fire, watch it fall and set another one along the way, which explodes, making massive whole in outer wall and killing all the soldiers behind it? JC3, btw. Yet I have no delusion that those are just cheap thrills, since whole game is based on them, and that there is nothing more to it underneath them - which is fine for such game.

But I don't consider Zelda as a cheap thrills game, and, for me, most of those lauded mechanisms boil down to that - and when you scrap them, what is left is not really that great.

Plenty of games have realistic (or attempting to be realistic) destructibility physics. It's the addition of interwoven chemistry that marks BOTW apart; fire doesn't just deal damage or destroy things, it also changes the properties of items; an animal set alight will become cooked meat, an apple that rolls into a fire becomes a roasted apple, chuchu jelly becomes red chuchu jelly. Rain puts out everything from campfires to fire keese to the fuses of bomb arrows. A deer or chuchu killed with an ice arrow will become frozen meat and white chuchu jelly, same for meat or chuchu jelly dropped in freezing environments. Hit a wet enemy with an electric weapon and you'll get a lightning AOE.

These aren't just vestigial mechanics put there for "cheap thrills"; they power the core tenant of BOTW's philosophy; setting the player loose in a truly dynamic world and letting them discover how it works through experimentation and discovery. They can no more be separated from the game's identity than you can separate the Plasmids from Bioshock or gravity from Mario Galaxy.