Why? You dislike the game? I think it's totally fair to bring up BOTW as a point of comparison for a discussion about game design. Even if it's just to remark that it's interesting that Aonuma's team had similar thoughts about how to make the traveling in an open world game more engaging to the player and incorporate those mechanics into the gameplay loop. I guarantee you people from the Zelda team were paying attention to MGSV and the Death Stranding team was paying attention to Breath of the Wild.
You're absolutely right. There are game designers who think the player should be engaging with some gameplay system at all times.
Gotta get somewhere? Here's a traversal gameplay system you need to engage with to do it well.
Need to fight something? Here's a combat system.
Need to bullshit your way through something? Here's a generic dialogue system.
Need to get somewhere undetected? Here's stealth mechanics.
Basically, if there's a decision to be made, the player should be interacting with some gameplay system of some kind.
It's absolutely unnecessary for traversal in games to be limited to just holding the analog stick forward.
You don't hold the attack button to win a fight, why should you just hold the analog up to walk be and done with it? The reason we don't walk long distances like that, or climb mountains like that is because it's actually really difficult and straining. So it makes sense Kojima would use his game design skills to gamify that.
Because game designers are just that: people who can look at the world and convey an experience through a system, defined by rules. When you interact with that system, you're then driven to
think and
feel as if you were doing the real thing, if the game is well designed.
Which then brings us gaming's ultimate gift: empathy. Games can unite us past words, stories and books because they can make us
feel something rather than just
learn about it.
It's one thing for you to hear of children starving in Africa, it would be another to play a well designed game that put you in those shoes...
Games can become the ultimate communication tool once we stop focusing on just making money out of it and start using it to its full potential!