I watched some playthroughs and got the feeling the world is kind of empty, and shrine puzzles very basic.  Speed players can finish the game in 1h 10 minutes.   I have to believe that with so many reviewers giving top marks it is really good. Maybe the sum is greater than it's parts.  It's very hard to tell why this is the best game ever without hands on play.

Look at the distribution of user-scores. A lot of users just gave a zero (didn't even knew that was possible, thought one would be the lowest). There are practically no medium user-scores. So haters downvote it just for the fun of it.

It also depends on how you use the weapons. Attacking high level enemies with low level weapons make them break faster as well as hammering away on their shields or using swords on rocky creatures etc. When you use them right they last a lot longer. But true, eventually my prized 45 dmg two hander broke as well.

There is a tendency in the negative reviews: they saw gameplay on Youtube. People who actually played it are mostly positive. The point is, the mechanics are mostly known from other games (although I don't know any game which combines it all that way), but it all balances out so extremely well, that it is a lot of fun. So looking videos don't catch you at surprise, actually playing it might feel just very good.

I didn't play the intro, I tried on someone else's save game, he has a good 8-10 hours at least. The immense openness impressed the hell out of me, others things were not as good as I was hoping for. But there's no doubt that I need to own this game if and when I get a Switch.

Sigh... because i'm not blind and watching videos in the internet is a thing (also, i wasnt born yesterday)?

I will be getting to play it tomorrow anyways. I don't know why you are so offended though. All i said is that it isn't as revolutionary as Ocarina and that is obvious. This isn't the first open world game and it won't be the last, but i am pretty certain that the Witcher 3 is better.

OoT was not the first 3D game and it was not the last. Honestly OoT wasn't revolutionary at all. All of its mechanics were natural evolutions incited by the hardware -- the rest of the game is just holdovers from ALTTP. People have nostalgia goggles with the game.

Having played both the Witcher 3 and this game, they both have their different strengths and weaknesses. The Witcher 3 has a better story, and decent side-quests, BoTW has a better world, better exploration mechanics, and better combat. One is a story heavy scripted and mostly linear title (despite the "open-world" attribution) the other focuses on nonlinearity.

Watching a game on YouTube is not the same as playing it, not even close. That is silly to even imply.

Zelda was the first action adventure game i'm fairly certain. If not, it was the first one that matters anyways. It was a completely new experience at the time. BotW is a type of game that has been made in buckets last and this gen.

Heck even Nintendo made one in Xeniblade X before this.

Actually, the first open world that mattered was GTA3 on the PS2.

8-10 hours is not a lot of time as far as this game is concerned, some people have taken 5 hours just to get off the plateau while many haven't even been to the first village in their first 15.

Tomb Raider (91% metacritic) released two years before OoT for example.

To describe a game as "open-world" tells me nothing about how it plays. It is obvious by the comparison of Xenoblade Chronicles X and BoTW: two games with vastly different experiences, gameplay styles, and genres.