Tons of positive reviews for Tears of the Kingdom have come out, favorably comparing it to BotW. But, I haven't seen much said on improving over BotW, other than 'it has more stuff'.
I know the simple solution is 'just pirate it and try it out', which, yeah, I might do eventually when I have time, but I've emulated enough to know that it's not always super easy to get everything working right.
Regardless, I felt that BotW was too big and aimless, with an open world that felt empty. The people that like BotW seem to 'make their own fun', and use physics to solve open ended problems. Which, sounds fun, but my fun was kinda killed by the feeling that nothing had a point. I just felt like most of the 'rewards' were just weapons that would break (which, I don't even mind weapon durability, but it did make weapons as a reward suck), or collectables that had minimal impact on the game. Only a few set pieces did much for me, and they were very few and far between. Overall, played about a dozen hours, then went and killed Ganon, to little fanfare.
And, if Tears of the Kingdom is strictly BotW 2, I'd rather not 'waste' another 12 hours. But, I've heard some people say they added dungeons, and more direction to the game. Any opinions from you all?
Fully agree.
And, I'm not anti-open world. Zelda has always had open worlds, back to literally the first game. But, it had more of a 'Medroidvania-esque' progression, more focused on unlocking abilities to unlock areas, often in a not-strictly-linear order.
But, the newer 'open world' style of go anywhere and do anything, has issues, and I think a lot of open world games would be better with semi-closed in levels. That's definitely how I felt about Elden Ring, a game I really liked overall, but I felt that the open world aspect was a negative.
And, I don't think the 'semi open 3d world' style they had, going back to Ocarina, had anything wrong with it. I can't fault Nintendo for wanting to do something different, but a lot of their innovations in open world have been kinda flops. Wind Waker was good, but the boating sections sucked overall (though, the speed sails, and cutting down the triforce quest in the remakes makes it a lot more bearable.) Skyward Sword's flying sections were another cool idea that mostly sucked in execution.
And, I feel like BotW is the same. Just, a big blank 'ocean/sky' of not much in it. But, unlike WW or SS, there weren't really even any significant sections other than the Wild. Breath of the Wild had a ton of innovations, but the world is just so pointless. It never felt like I made progress. It never felt like there was any real reason not to just go and kill Ganon asap.