I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that "it's been done before so it's bad", I'm saying that if it's called a paradigm shift in open world design I need more of a justification for it.
"Has it been done before?" is just not a good metric for capturing innovation. "Newness" is vague, and the question kind of misses the point. Look at something like WoW. A lot of it was EverQuest-inspired, but a number of refinements, a difference of emphasis (convenience vs. ...I don't know, immersion?), and brilliant execution added up to a revolution in the MMO space.
Same thing with BotW. Now, I'm not quite sure it can be called a paradigm shift, but for me, the open world design did feel like a WoWish shift for the genre. Going in-depth on that would amount to rehashing what makes BotW's world so fantastic, and I'm not sure this thread needs that (...climbing simultaneously adds a new level of freedom, interactivity, and verticality; in addition to climbing, a lot of other interactivity - think runes, the "things work how you'd expect them to" aspect, etc. - is infused into the world, and this both blends with the world's more atmospheric touches and creates new venues for creative expression; there's a level of deliberateness that's unusual for world of that size and interactive scope; so on and so on). But yeah.
Basically, individual components might be seen in various other places, but holistically, it all comes together into something that just
feels different. Going back to WoW again, it does that thing where it remains similar enough to exist in the same space as the other games we use as reference points for the genre, but also manages to be distinguished enough that going back to those games just isn't the same. Not necessarily better or worse, but...more revealing of what the genre has been.
By the way, the other aspect of the WoW comparison that's relevant here is that not everyone was impressed by it. BotW is certainly not a "how the fuck are you not blown away right now?" moment. For me, though, it definitely adds something new to the discussion around open world games.
