Take away my gamer badge if you want, but Breath of the Wild didn't feel like a Zelda game to me, it felt like a Xenoblade game.
It's not a bad game at all, of course, I just don't like it as much as say, Ocarina of Time or Windwaker.
I wasn't a fan of the lack of real dungeons, the small pool of enemies and the even smaller pool of bosses (Bosses are usually my favorite part of Zelda). It all got very same-y fast.
I usually don't like to complain about graphics, but I really wasn't a fan of Breath of the Wilds art style. There was very little texture or definition to anything, which made the characters faces look like a blob of colours sometimes. I usually love cell shading too. In my opinion, Windwaker did it much better. It probably helps that Windwakers character designs complimented the style.
It also sucks that Ganon was reduced to a generic evil purple cloud without any character other then "ROAR!". He was an interesting, intelligent and intimidating character in Windwaker (I know I keep using Windwaker as an example shut up).
I kinda miss when Zelda games had that Dungeons and Dragons kind of feel to its world, with uncanny things like redeads, wallmasters and deadhands living deep in dungeons that felt like no one had set foot in them in hundreds of years.
I hope the new Breath of the Wild is at least going to have some more variety than the first one.
EDIT: Oh, and the music. The Legend of Zelda series has some of the most memorable music of all time. However, BotW went for minimalist piano tinkling with no real memorable tracks. I struggle to think of more then one. Not saying the music was bad, but again, it just wasn't Zelda. Zelda music isn't supposed to be forgettable background piano ambiance.
Seamless open world fantasy RPG where the main gameplay loop is exploring to fight mobs to level and find crafting ingredients, occasionally finding points of interest where you fight unique variants of creatures or go through small dungeons to get special loot, when you want to move on in the story you go to a big main dungeon or boss arena. See also Elden Ring and the two latest Pokemon games.
Seems pretty similar to me.
Nah, for me the traversal in BotW makes it a totally different experience than TW3. Climbing over mountains and gliding around is so different to riding a horse along a predetermined path. The Witcher is so story-dense as well, while Zelda aggressively is not. It’s side quests are also much more engaging. BotW’s shrines and dungeons are much more about puzzle solving than the Witcher where you go in and kill everything, or maybe talk your way through.
Yeah, calling it a "Witcher clone" isn't really accurate I'll concede, but there's a specific design philosophy to open worlds which I think first appears the Witcher 3 and now kinda saturates the industry. I don't think it's a objective improvement over older designs that are more linear but also more detailed and focused.
You are right that both have saturated the industry, but yeah BOTW rewards exploring while witcher 3 can be downright dull for long stretches.
You have a point with Elden Ring but are completely wrong about Witcher 3 imo. The main appeal there was completing the narrative content. Fighting random mobs was near-pointless, especially if fighting monsters that were a higher level which would be arbitrarily given 10xHP or whatever. The PoIs on the map were much more of a traditional "Ubisoft model" style open world.