True, but I played it just to try to understand why people liked it so much; even after completing the thing, I still cannot see why, when it's so aggressively mediocre. I didn't even mention the pseudo-dungeons, the four giant beasts, that just did not have the same atmosphere.
I'd much prefer Assassin's Creed Origins or Ghost of Tsushima as "medieval" (non-modern-era) open-world games.
You just didn't liked what BoTW had to offer and that's fine, but I still think it's one of the best open world games there is despite it's flaws and that's just because it offered something that all other open world games failed to deliver before and that's just a pure sense of freedom
I liked Origins quite a bit but it doesn't hold anything against BoTW in that sense, I liked how beautiful it was and how easy it was to traverse the world, but the map is too big for no good reason just like almost every Ubisoft game, it's filled with stupid ways to extend the game with dumb but mandatory story missions when it's not just a « soft xp lock » that's blocking you so it's asking you to farm for xp to get further into the game (oh but if you don't like that, there are nice xp boosters available on the shop !!!!), in Odyssey it asked me to give almost all my money to a story character that wasn't even there for long for a story quest, like sure in BoTW you can give all your money to fairies but that's not mandatory for you to complete the game, you aren't literally forced to give your 10k rupees, in Odyssey you are
The huge thing that made BoTW popular is that it is basically Zelda 1's philosophy but in a modern game, it doesn't hold your hand just like almost every other open world game.
Like sure, GTA is cool and I really enjoy it, but there's a huge dichotomy between the freedom you have outside of missions and the HUGE linearity in missions where you really don't have anything to do by yourself, BoTW don't have that and you feel that freedom everytime. The map isn't too big and is interesting all the time even tho people will say that « muh it's boring it's empty » like yeah duh it's kinda post apocalyptic, doesn't mean that it's bad design because it's genuinely one of the best open world map there is, it could be bigger but it's not because it would be worse and Ubisoft open world games failed to understand that, they just make big and beautiful maps but don't make them interesting enough
And honestly the combat in Assassin's Creed is as bad as it is in BoTW, sure your weapons don't break but they compensate by making the ennemies even more tankier and that's just not really funny tbh
It's fine to not like BoTW, not every game is for everybody and actually I'm kinda glad you don't like it because it means that it's goal wasn't to just be for everyone, but it reconcilied me with the open world genre which was the same since Far Cry 3 and even then I just couldn't finish it because the map was boring and I was tired of climbing towers for a tiny map stamp (and BoTW totally fixed it and told literally everyone in the industry how towers should be made in open world games)
Now I hope that BoTW 2 will correct it's flaws, but if BoTW 1 got so much success and praise, it's not because it's flawless, it's because it succeeded in offering something that felt completely new despite the fact that open world games were so popular and everywhere, there's a reason that everybody took lessons from it, doesn't mean it's a perfect game or that everyone should enjoy it, but it is a wonderful game and that's undeniable, it's far from mediocre, it just wasn't what you were looking for in an open world game and that's absolutely fine, to me it clicked all the checks and for some who liked how open world games used to be made (I didn't, felt like too many times it could be replaced by a select menu and that's bad design to me), they still enjoyed the changes, hence the praise
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