For me, the easiest way to describe what BotW looks to me, is that its the only game in the past 10 years that, imo, has both the mechanical and systems density of MGSV, but instead of taking that density of systems to make the best stealth-action TPS with base-building mechanics, all of that is taken to instead make a fully realised open-world
while retaining as much of the systemic density that something like MGSV has.
To me, game design is very much a marriage of :
(a) Systems
(b) The blending of the systems
For me, GTAV and Yakuza are a game with a ton of (a), but absolutely poor (b). A lot of content, mini-game, but they are not seamless blends of game systems, but rather a sushi box of different cool ideas within one game.
Crysis and Crysis: Warhead are games with very limited amounts of (a), but very excellent (b). The core of the game is the existence of the playbox and enemy AI that you can manipulate with the 3 core powers of the suit. Rather than put in 100 systems and hope it all come together, it chooses 5-10 and ensures all of them feel like a single piece. It is like a Tiramisu.
Far Cry 2 is what I would call games that try to do (a) and (b) well, but ultimately fail at (b) because of the developer inability to make the significant amount of systems come together as a whole. A lot of cool idea, like spreading of fire, malaria, mapping, etc, but none of those cool ideas actually came together in a way that felt good. Some people disagree, but thats my view of FC2.
FC3/4 steps back from FC2 a bit, and is instead a more focused game that is still a marriage of (a) & (b), but rather than try to hit 100 points for (a) and (b), it feels closer to a game that is content with 60 points on systems, and are focused on making the systems blend better. Its a better game than FC2, but ultimately its still just a blend of leaner mechanics that make the game fun, but not as deep as FC2.
To me, no game has really done a mastery of (a) & (b) at a high level for both aside from MGSV. If you look at the game purely from a systems-level, it is an utterly insane game in terms of how much you can mess around with it and not find the limits of where it doesnt work anymore. Its why Ground Zeros could be such a powerful sandbox, is because the systems themselves allow for tweaks of the same setting to be different dynamic sandboxes that come together. But even though MGSV does (a) and (b) very well, to an extent, one could argue it suffers from a waste of resources and design choices. So much effort was put into facets of Mother Base.
Ever since the BotW gameplay reveal at E3, I knew that Zelda was aiming to basically be the realisation of the MGSV level blend of (a) and (b), but instead put in the open-world and given that Zelda charm. If executed perfectly, it would mean a game with all the strengths of MGSV, and few of its weaknesses.
And by all accounts, BotW appear to have achieved that. A perfect blend of (a) and (b) that allows the game to deliver on the notion of an open-world approach that other games with inferior (a)s and (b)s can never copy unless they improve those elements.
