This is something I've been thinking a lot about with regards to the popular games these days that aren't F2P and I often poke at open world stuff to see what makes them tick. Take away the large scale world and what do you have aside from that? An extremely basic third person controller, a bunch of weapons they probably spent five seconds doing and then a soft body physics simulation for vehicles and vehicle damage.
They seem to spend most of their time spamming art assets all over the places to make the game seem bigger than it really is but if you actually try to 'game' in it you quickly realise that there's fuck all to do and they've put tons of empty space between the game. Seems like people who enjoy these games are the types who are easily distracted by all the shiny stuff and don't really care much about the gameplay of which there is very little.
It's so bad now that when I look at any modern game I check for whether it's linear or not and make sure there's no designing mechanics in there. The reason being is chances are if it's linear the developer probably spent more time with the level design and making it fun than simply scattering assets about the place and overcompensating with procedural generation.
Level design is dead in the AAA industry, so many of today's games are technically big but feel small whereas so many older games are technically small but feel big. Rather analogous to the difference between hi-fi graphics and good artistry.
Being a lifelong Zelda fan I'm especially disappointed to see this bug catch the Zelda franchise. And both BOTW and TOTK are miles above most post-Skyrim sandbox games, they're still excellent games in a lot of ways and the franchise had grown way too linear prior to BOTW. But while I could at least understand the mistakes they made with BOTW, the fact that they didn't correct those mistakes in TOTK (the "dungeons" in TOTK were a joke, among other things) makes me pessimistic for the future of the franchise.
I agree completely on your take on Zelda. I am also pessimistic for their future. I really hope they go back to the old formula, even if "modern audiences" bitch about it. BOTW and TOTK were great games, but they weren't Zelda games. I would take Ocarina or Windwaker over either of them.
Link to the Past is still the gold standard.
Twilight Princess too?
Twilight Princess was just meh.
BOTW did not grab my interest at all despite how much praise it got precisely for the reasons you describe. There were also a good number of complaints about it's durability system and I'm not going to play a game that I know will frustrate and annoy me with that kind of gameplay.
I haven't been able force myself to finish BOTW. It's pointlessly big.
What? You thought "look in correct direction to figure out where you need to go on the map that's pretty clearly marked, then go there, then flip a switch" was weak? You weren't excited by opening a chest and finding ... some arrows or Zonai parts?
I just played through Majora's Mask again and am nearly done with Minish Cap and they both just make me sad at the state of video games today. Don't get me wrong, both BotW and TotK did some things extremely well and are impressive technical achievements, but they didn't even bother to try to do any of the things that I care about in a Zelda game.
You've put your finger on it and named the vague sense of something being off I've been experiencing for years.
There's been so much shift for generations now towards procedural generation and that mindset has almost certainly leaked over into even the handcrafted level design space. Good level design is hard and with the flood of inferior game designers ballooning the industry...well I suppose it was inevitable in retrospect.
I didnt play totk but did watch a bunch. The "level design" innovation was in the movement between the sky world, the normal land, and the underworld.