**THIS POST WILL HAVE SPOILERS IN IT. WE ARE DISCUSSING THE GAME POST-COMPLETION***
Having finished the game recently (not 100% that will take weeks\months without a guide) I disagree with a lot of your criticisms.
I'll start with the things that I do agree with.
Also, the combat shrines... They're literally all the exact same. Seriously, nobody was able to come up with something more interesting here? You have 3 different enemy types in those shrine, but they're literally all the same: You walk in, a single enemy spawns and you need to defeat that enemy in order to complete the shrine. Not once did I fight multiple enemies in there, let alone more varied types - It's always the same walking guardian types. Couldn't Nintendo have mixed it up a bit more by putting a walking guardian AND a flying guardian in one of the combat shrines just to make things a LITTLE more interesting? That design decision was baffling to me.
I probably agree with this more than anything else you said. I was hoping that the combat shines would step up the difficultly not just with the weapons and health the enemy had, but with multiple enemies, changes to the terrain\hazards, hot\cold environment, attacks and coordination, immunities, etc. They had all of these tools available to them in the overworld and in several shrines, but they didn't utilize them here, which is disappointing.
Dungeons: One of the reasons why I LOVE Zelda is because Nintendo has some of the best level designers in the industry working for them. Even though games like Skyward Sword or Twilight Princess get a lot of shit today for following the same old Zelda formula, the dungeon designs usually are just genuinely well figured out. They're less sprawling and open than they were in the 2d Zeldas, sure, but they're still brilliantly designed. The 4 Breath of the Wild Dungeons felt pretty short to me and I breezed through them in almost no time. Variation within the dungeons is also not as well figured out as it used to be. You see, Zelda usually did a good job sectioning the dungeons into Puzzle Zones, Combat Zones, etc., so if you're stuck on a certain puzzle, you can go to some other area and fight some enemies... not so here, since the dungeons here feel like one big puzzle and if you don't know how to solve it, you're just shit out of luck.
And in the older Zelda games, everything got varied up once you got the dungeon item and had to re-traverse the dungeon using the item you just acquired to put another twist on the dungeon designs. That is obviously not the case here - Nintendo did try to put a little variation into the Divine Beasts design by allowing you to 'control' the Divine Beasts, but if you break down the dungeon design of Breath of the Wild, I'd argue that Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess had way better designed dungeons.
This I can agree with if only for the length and variety of the dungeons. In case anyone hasn't played through all 4 dungeons they all have the same format once you are inside:
1. Get the map\controls for the Divine Beast
2. Get 5 Terminals activated
3. Activate main terminal and fight the Ganon-Blight.
There are little secrets to find in hidden away chests but it would have been better to have them modify this formula more drastically for each of them.
1. Make one a pure traversal puzzle manipulating the beast
2. Make one riddles with battles instead of puzzles
3. Make one "environmental" based on manipulating the weather (Lighting storms to draw electricity, rain for water gathering\control, sun\clouds to change temperature)
4. Make one the traditional "find the terminals in the maze".
Some things I think are subjective, or I experienced completely differently than you did:
Generally speaking, I thought the world was too big. I'm generally not a HUGE fan of open world games (and yet I have to admit that BotW is definitely the best open world game I've ever played), simply because I'd never want to design a game that way. I think it's wrong to start with a huge landscape and then try to shoehorn a ton of content into it versus building really strong content in smaller chunks and then putting it together to ensure that every inch of the world truly feels well designed.
If you're not a game developer, here's a bit of info on how these open world games are built: You usually start with a large terrain and sculpt the landscape, then you fill in the landscape with content. This video gives you a basic idea of how these worlds are crafted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozXYKpUugd8
So, throughout my entire time playing the game, I couldn't shake the thought that Nintendo must have decided on the size of the world at the start of the project and couldn't back-paddle afterwards simply because the world is made out of one huge terrain. Most Terrain engines don't allow you to easily modify and change sizes once various parts have already been built, since scaling the terrain would affect everything you've already built (again, I'm not saying Nintendo didn't have more sophisticated terrain tools, but that's my simple guess since the world feels way too large for its own good).
I think the approach to making the landscape and then "filling it with stuff to do" is a perfectly valid way to approach an open world game. After all, that is how an actual civilization\world would arise. Landscape is shaped by weather\tectonics. Wildlife migrates to the area via land\sea\air. Higher intelligence beings migrate to places based on exploration\hardship\economics and setup a town or trading post. Based on the culture of the higher beings the landscape is affected in different ways. Some would seek to completely exploit and subjugate the land, devastating wildlife. Others would seek to live in harmony with it, barely touching the surrounding areas. Approaching the design in this way also lends to the "believability"of the world. Distances between towns feels natural and real. The places where the various species\races are established make sense for their environment.
The same is true for the Korok Challenges: Most of these are completely mindless and similar: Find a certain rock in the world that stands out, pick it up, a Korok appears. Put a rock in the right spot in the middle of a ring of rocks, boom, a Korok appears. Jump into a ring of flowers in the water, a Korok appears. Shoot some balloons, a Korok appears... Rinse and Repeat. You'll do these exact same challenges DOZENS of times. Again, I'm guessing Nintendo just saw that their world is too big and they had to put in a lot of these repetitive, not very fun little challenges in order to at least have SOMETHING in the world instead of just traversal followed by more traversal. Why have such a huge world if you then have to fill it with repetitive content?
I can half-agree with this in terms of variety (the solutions are reused a bit too much). But the approach to Korok seeds, in my opinion, is not to "fill out" an empty world, but to give a small reward to players that go off the beaten path and interact with the world in ways that show you are exploring. Climb a huge tree on top of a mountain, sure here's a korok seed. Complete a circle of rocks, seed. Check out a strange formation of some kind, seed. etc. "I wonder what's up on that rock, maybe I can see something interesting or odd from there. There's a rock up here that's out of place... probably a Korok." That's why less than half of the seeds are "required" if you want to max your inventory, they don't expect people to find all of them or hell even a quarter of them.
Quests: Here again, the game suffers from the same exact issue all Open World games have, meaning, most quests are just variations of fetch quests. You have literal fetch quests in there that are as simple as "NPC tells you to bring item X to it, quest completes once you do that", others are a little more clever, but overall, a hell of a lot of the side quests feel pretty menial and boring. A really good Quest was Eventide Island (The Robinson Crusoe inspired one), but those are few and far between... I have a few quests left open and have little to no motivation to actually finish all of them.
While I kind of agree with this in principle, it's odd to expect people to not act like people. People need things. You agree to help them out as a favor or in return for goods and services. That's how stuff works in real life. What I found though is that half of the "fetch" quests were already done by the time I accepted them (I already had the items or the ingredients to make the item) simply because I was already exploring and gathering them on my own. The only ones that I've found to be silly or tedious is when someone asks you to gather huge stacks of items. I'm looking at you Hudson. 50 fucking stacks of wood? I guess I'll mow down a forest real quick. 5 frogs? I got'em right here. Ingredients for a recipe, got'em right here.
And lastly the things I completely disagree with:
So why do I think the world is too large? Because of a lack of varied content. That's always the problem with Open World Games - What good is a huge world if large parts of it are fairly empty with nothing for you to do? I'm honestly sick and tired of developers proclaiming that the world of the game they're building is x times larger than the world in their previous game - That's only a great thing if you also scaled up your team by a lot in order to be able to fill that world with super fun content, which is most often not the case. Me just having to traverse longer distances that a designer didn't even touch doesn't mean the game is more fun, in fact, the opposite is usually true, which games like No Man's Sky have proven very well I think. Just running around in boring areas with little to no interactivity is just not fun.
I do think Nintendo did a good job giving you movement tools like Shield Surfing, Paragliding, Climbing, etc., but a hell of a lot of time in the game is spent just traversing through the terrain by holding the analog stick forward, running, climbing while always keeping an eye on your Stamina bar - and that in itself isn't the most fun you could have. Often times you have to run 5-10 minutes from one place to another doing fairly menial tasks like running and climbing just to arrive at your goal.
And that's also when Fast Travel comes into play, since having to do that once is bad enough and developers know that you want to quickly get to the fun parts, so they allow you to skip large parts of the Open World. But the irony here is... if that's your design process, then maybe your world shouldn't be that large in the first place?
At Moon, we have this 'fun per inch' principle - If we have the player just running for too long without any varied interactivity and fun content, then the level design is probably not great and should be reworked. We always try to put as much interactivity and diverse challenges into every inch of the worlds we're building as possible. We usually build hundreds of levels and then only use the levels that we feel are really fun, the rest gets cut and out of the good stuff we build the actual world. That way we know that there are no 'empty-feeling levels' - Everything needs to be well designed, all the stuff that feels empty should be improved or cut. Obviously there are always 'transition zones' between certain levels, but even those should be fun to traverse through or interact with. And again, that is often times not the case with open world games, the 'transition zones' usually end up being huge and empty... Simply compare that to how Zelda 1 or ALTTP were designed: Almost every single screen in those games is packed with secrets, enemies, objects you can interact with, etc. - There's barely a screen in those games where all you do is holding the analog stick into a direction without any other possibility of interactivity. And interactivity is where the fun comes from, interactivity is what games are all about.
I cannot for the life of me understand how you could play through this game and come away with the conclusion that there isn't enough varied content. It's baffling to me. Just the list of terrains is bananas:
Desert, Plains, Canyons, Rivers, Waterfalls, Castles, Mountains, Forests, Jungles, Towns (Multiple cultures), Lava\Magma, Ruins, Beaches, Tundra, That crazy looking Bone-like terrain, Complete Darkness, Fog, Blinding Snow and Sand, Lands of Perpetual Lightning, Giant Mazes. This world has *everything*.
I also can't agree with the "hold forward and watch your stamina bar" criticism. You are the one making the choice to simply "run forward or climb" for 10 minutes, blowing by everything that is going on around you. Trees with apples and mushrooms, bugs in the grass, fish in the river, hills to use as lookout points to assess pathing and obstacles, enemy camps and patrols, ruins with treasure, ore to mine and collect, wildlife to hunt or mount (if they are large enough), light shit on fire and fly, push rocks over cliffs, etc.
The weather keeps you on your toes too, changing the way you can move\climb, the equipment you can use, the armor you should wear, the food you should collect\cook\eat, the direction you can fly, use bombs, make campfires, etc.
As for the "fun per inch" principle, I don't think an open world has to constantly bombard you with shit to do for it to be entertaining. BotW has an ebb and flow structure to it where there is breathing room between "encounters" of varying sizes and intensity. Intense moments of combat are broken up by more leisurely strolls through grasslands. But these "low points" are not "empty". There is rarely a point in which you can literally do "nothing", See my previous paragraphs.
Reading this makes me imagine a person who goes camping and complains about shit to do. You're in nature for fuck's sake, you're literally surrounded by an innumerable number of things "to do".
Let's start with the Shrines: All 120 shrines look exactly the same. The actual puzzles and challenges in there are usually really well designed (apart from the horrible Motion Controlled ones, these shrines are just horribly bungled in my opinion), but I do think the game would've been better if there would've been more variation within the shrines to make them more memorable. Wouldn't it have been cool if the shrines in the Death Mountain Area would've been themed around fire and exploited all the various ways you can interact with fire in the game? Wouldn't it have been cool if the Death Mountain Shrines actually looked more like they belong in that area? Instead, all the 120 shrines in the game are completely interchangeable, shrines that are in the Death Mountain area could just as well be placed within Gerudo's Desert, etc.
If all you are looking at is aesthetics, then sure, they all "look" exactly the same. But even that is consistent with the world. They were created by a intelligent, religious monk-like race of people who worshipped the goddess Hylia. It's like complaining that Buddhist temples look too similar. Of course they share aesthetics!
There are area-themed shrines. The Death Mountain definitely had lava and fire themed shrines. There was also a "steep cliff" based one that is also thematically consistent.
Enemy Camps: Again, most of these are just the exact same setup. Yes, sometimes the enemies are a little tougher, but I'd really like to know how many of these 'Skull Structures with Bokoblins next to them' are in the game - My guess is dozens. Beat a few of the enemies, the chest unlocks, done. The same setups are then again scattered many, many, many times throughout the open world without any variation in challenge. In general, enemy variation was also a bit of a disappointment to me: For a world this large, it very much felt like there's barely a dozen different enemy designs in there. We have Guardians, Bokoblins, Keese, Octoroks, Lizalfos, Lynels... And I have a hard time naming more off the top of my head after just having finished the game. Again, that would've been fine in a smaller game, but for a game of this size, it becomes a bit of a drag that you always have to fight the same types of enemies that are only varied in color, but not behavior.
Let's list them off.
Guardians (Turret, Broken Walker, Walker, Flyer\Drone, Smaller Shrine size)
Bokoblins (Red, Blue, Black, Silver, Undead)
Moblins (Red, Blue, Black, Silver(? I haven't see one), Undead)
Keese (Regular, Fire, Ice, Electric, Swarm)
Octorocks (Land, Water, Rock)
Lizalfos (Regular, Fire Breath, Ice Breath, Electric Horn, Blue, Black, Undead)
Wizzrobe (Fire, Ice, Electric)
Lynels (Red, Blue, White)
Hinox (Red, Blue, Black)
Small Talus (Regular, Ice, Lava)
Talus (Regular, Ice, Lava)
Blight Spawn (Flying Heads, Eyes)
Molduga
Assuming I didn't forget any, that's 13 major types with 48 different varieties, not counting the one-off dungeon bosses and Ganon.
Enemies most definitely differ in behavior. The stronger versions of Bokoblins tank hits to hit you, Larger groups of them swarm around you. Archers snipe you and call in reinforcements when they spot you. Moblins of higher levels dodge your bombs as they chase you. White Mane Lynels have devastating AOE explosions, and the jump-attack with the AOE shockwave. Fights with them in larger areas have them use ranged attacks more regularly. Electric Arrow versions can rain down arrows from above, etc. Lizalfos hit in the water will tend to stay there and snipe you with a water attack. Fire and Ice Breath versions will put more distance between you are use those abilities to harm you. Octorocks have varying behavior, the land ones will freak out and run around like crazy, the rock ones will dodge every damned arrow you shoot at them. Wizzrobes of higher levels will summon storms of lightning\ice\fire.
Combat / Controls: This is the most baffling to me, since I think the controls are quite a bit too convoluted. The Quick-Weapon switching with the 'Dpad' is all kinds of weird to me (the game pauses while doing that... really?) and breaks the games flow, the combat in general is just a notch over the traditional 3d Zelda combat, things like Shield Surfing require the player to press 3 buttons... all of that makes the game feel a bit less polished than what you usually expect from a Nintendo game. Regarding the UI in general, Brad Colbow made a great video about improving BOTW's UI that I 100% agree with:
I don't understand the criticism here. You can pause the game and switch weapons at will, at any moment. This just gives you quick access without having to navigate though a larger menu. If anything it keeps the flow going better than having to open a menu to equip a new weapon when it breaks or if you run out of arrows or have the wrong arrows equipped from your last fight.
The combat in BotW is enhanced by the multitude of approaches you can take to a given fight. Fire arrows instantly kill Ice enemies and vice versa. Flying in from above, dropping a bomb and landing with a drop-attack from high up causing a shockwave. Distract enemies with an arrow and sneak up on them. Wait until night when they sleep to get sneak-strikes. Blow them up with barrels. Push rocks on them. Hit them with metal crates\rocks.
Shield surfing is a completely superfluous addition that is there purely for fun. I beat the game without ever using it. Slopes are more easily conquered with flight and it doesn't eat my shields durability. I know there is a competition in the Hebra region, but I haven't done it yet. It's 3 buttons so you don't do it unintentionally. R + X + A in midair is really hard to do without meaning to.
The video you linked is great. I agree with pretty much the whole thing. He was wrong about one aspect (If you drop your currently equipped weapon the next weapon you pick up is automatically equipped), but that's probably just an oversight on his part.
Conclusion
I wrote some pretty strong words in response here, hopefully I didn't offend you. You have the right to your opinion and I respect it, but I just saw so much stuff in here that I disagree with vehemently that I had to respond.