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.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too.
When it first came out people were raving about it, so I guess people mellowed out.
I think this is because it genuinely broke the formula that was getting incredibly boring with open world games. The Ubisoft formula of linear gameplay presented in an open world format was tossed out in favour of complete and total player freedom, with the only linear story component essentially being a tutorial.
We haven't seen AAA devs tackle making a world where you can literally run straight to the final boss in the first 20 minutes of the game before. With nothing but world design itself deterring players from doing that. In terms of open world design and player-created emergent gameplay it's second to none.
This definitely comes at the expense of certain elements of traditional Zelda design though. Traditional Zelda design is predicated upon tools that Link collects functioning as linear gameplay gates, you can't progress to a certain area without a hookshot, you can't progress to the area where you would get the hookshot with a boomerang, you can't etc etc etc. This loop of "acquire new tool to unlock more progress" is not compatible with the kind of world where freedom is limitless. I agree however that more traditional feeling puzzle dungeons could exist but there's some serious limitations to design if you can't design the puzzles around knowing the player will have X tools when they get there.
I mean, we have. Morrowind can be completed without bugs in about 20min, even without taking the "back path" and avoiding the main quest (I think it's 7 min for that).
Less if you don't count the v1.0 alchemy singularity as a bug. You can just walk up, get keening and sunder, stab the heart with them before you die, and win.
Morrowind's devteam was only 30ish people, I don't think it's comparable to what we refer to as AAA. When they started work on Morrowind there were literally 6 people working at the company after a string of financial failures leading to them being acquired by Zenimax.
The fact it got made was a miracle of passion by its absolutely tiny team on the verge of the company ending.
That wasn't too unusual for a circa 2000 AAA game. Half Life had 30 People, Halo even fewer. KOTOR was about 30.
NwN1 did have 75, though, but it had the additional challenge of multiplayer persistent worlds and a whole DM game system, along with a new engine when Morrowind had one half made.