[zalo]

Everything in BotW has that formulaic/modular/cookie-cutter feel that a Bethesda game does. None of the side quests particularly stood out to me, whereas I’ll frequently recall hidden gem areas in OoT and Wind Waker with fondness.

It’s clear that it was a game that was produced highly in parallel, with independent parallel teams (of interns?) and obscene levels of modular asset reuse. Exploration is often rewarded with a cookie-cutter item, or (even worse) a Korok seed rather than an expansion of the lore or new stories.

Many of the things I hate about procedurally generated games or the recent spate of mass production open world games (ie Genshin Impact) are present in BotW.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are games like Dark Souls, with relatively little asset reuse and great lore-expanding rewards for exploration.