I've thought about this before, but I feel like it get tedious while the games are designed the way they are. It would make more sense if the game world had a more Metroidvania or Soulslike design where it's basically a giant interconnected dungeon, so no massive fields would need to keep crossing to get from one part of the map to another. Traversal would have to be more about routing than about feeling expansive.
So basically Darkworld from LTTP, but in 3D. It'd be interesting to try.
Not really. The issue is that the lack of a time limit combined with the lack of a central plot makes the game feel very static and dead. "Yeah, sure, go spend 40 hours unlocking every shrine and gathering up 600 Korok Seeds. Ganon and Zelda will both wait patiently while you do and the gamestate of the map won't change at all in the meantime either."
To be fair, you can say that about just about every game in the series outside Majora's Mask.
"Yeah sure, go collect Poes in Hyrule field. Zelda and Gannondorf will wait in the meantime."
Its just me or Zelda fans have a love-hate relationship with BotW?
Like, they admit its a great game, maybe the best of the series, but they do so reluctantly, because of its changes and what impact the game had on both the series and goytendo?
Never played it anyway, I only know the final boss is ass and its a open world slop done right.
I really like BOTW. I think the 3D series was getting stale because there hadn't been a shakeup in the design in around 20 years by the time BOTW came out outside of things like "It's 3D Zelda but now he has a boat!" I'm not saying the formula they came up with in for OOT wasn't great, but the series had become stagnant.
I feel like with BOTW they were trying to create a post apocalyptic wasteland in the Zelda style and they did a great job of it. They just nailed this lonely, atmospheric setting where it feels like you're living in a world that has suffered some sort of horrible calamity and only a few on the outskirts of that world have survived. It's very clearly a world on the decline where people are still trying to scrape out an existence. A lot of people complain about the lack of a story, but it really doesn't need one because the world speaks volumes. You'll com across a random burned out house surrounded by broken guardians and you're reminded that this is a world that has been destroyed in some long ago conflict. I really feel like it's the kind of thing they were going for with the future in Zelda 64 where you you never actually see what happens after you get the Master Sword, you wake up after seven years and everything is just all fucked up and decaying. There's been a war and your side already lost. BOTW isn't perfect, though. The divine beasts are kind of a joke, and there really should have been four proper linear Zelda dungeons accessed from this gigantic overworld they set up. I think they were trying to go for something different with the Divine Beasts, but it just doesn't work.
TOTK is still a pretty good game, but they did away with the empty, lonely feeling of BOTW. Now instead of a tower being in a giant bog hole that will suck you in and you have to figure out how to get to the top without any real direction, a guy will be there and he'll directly tell you an elevator is broken and you have to fix it to get him to the tower so he can fix it. It does have the depths, which I think saves the game, but besides that it's just BOTW with a lot of what made BOTW special stripped out of it and a bunch of complicated physics crammed in to compensate.
If the next game is similar to BOTW formula, I feel like the series would just be stagnating again. BOTW was a moment in time where their ambitions got reigned in by the limitations of the Wii U and helped them captured lightning in a bottle, giving people this stripped down, atmospheric experience. They need to do something different again now. I think marrying BOTW with more traditional 3D Zelda design as others have mentioned here would be an interesting project.
