The handwringing over openworlds not ER or BOTW and now TOTK is fucking amazing and it's always the dumbest, entirely on the user, reasons. It's that "Ubification of Elden Rings" meme image turned into a person, a person who doesn't know that accessibility options exist and that you can turn off much of the "braindead" features you think Ubisoft mandates into their UI as the default experience. ACO and ACV in particular are incredibly easy to do this on, as - iirc - most of the quests in both games specifically force you to find the exact locations of things by the information you receive WITHIN the games narrative (like "The Cultist was last seen east of JibJab. . .") so that you aren't being led by the nose with a waypoint (which you can) and that you aren't just completely lost.
And that is if you want to stay on the beaten path. There is just as much world to explore in these games (or not explore) as there is in ER and the new ZELDA's in these open worlds, with some really interesting locations, but somehow we just nose-thumb them because you can't set a bush on fire and use "real physics" to lift yourself up into the sky using nothing but a kite to reach them. I've spent just as much time in the last two AC's looking out over the horizon (or just peeking at the map with no icons on it) and saying "I wonder what is over there. . ." as I have in ZELDA or ER, and more often than not there is something there as expected. . .just like in ZELDA/ER.
You'll note I've said nothing about the quality of what is there as that is largely subjective. Personally, I am not finding the reward of MOST of my exploration in TOTK to be interesting. It is cute and whimsical to come across another Korok with another seed (which is like, totally NOT part of a collectathon because, like, these games have evolved past mindless "collecting as gameplay" and that tracker on the loading screen is just like a running tally and NOT AT ALL the same kind of collectathon gameplay in Ubi-Openworlds) but is that really any more or less rewarding than coming across some lonely island that has a legendary beast or Viking encounter or any of the other bits Ubisoft shoved into Europe for ACV? Guess it all depends on your tastes, whether you see any difference in the two.
The ONLY thing that I find that sets your ZELDA's specifically apart from other open worlds is the "physics" system and the emergent solutions to exploration it gives. That is it.
. . .like if we really want to talk about open worlds who were able to nail exploration, "hand holding" and the reward of accomplishment. . .NONE of these games even touches OUTWARD a game that if it weren't Eurojank or actually had a budget (advertising or otherwise) for it, would have gotten the proper attention from the 'streams, that it should have and would have actually inspired developers to take chances with gameplay.
