>>718599509 (OP)
Open world is a marketing department invented branding device. What makes games fun is interactivity. "Open World" is meant to sell an experience of an open ended and sandbox style game to explore, but most open worlds are anything but a sandbox. And a sandbox is just a game with a high amount of interactivity and reactivity... so Open World isn't what we should be talking about, we should be talking about Interactivity!
Looking at OOT, we can see some of the best examples of giving players freedom to explore and experiment in a game world... it's a highly interactive game!
What happens if I grab a chicken and jump.. or if I attack one? Do people say different things if I wear a mask? What sorts of stuff can I put in a bottle... what can I do with bottled items? What happens if I slice a sign? On and on, OOT gives the player an ever growing toolbox of items and ways of interacting with the game world and it all pays off with a world that reacts to the player's experimentation in spades! On top of that every area is layered with secrets that are slowly peeled back as the player gets new ocarina songs and items to experiment with. Nothing is wasted space, every inch of the game world has meaning and interactivity (a special benefit of the low poly style, no noise, all gameplay).
So by every measure, OOT is a far more interactive and open game than BotW, because BotW gives the player a big map with lots of places to go... but nothing to do there! There are no real surprises in BotW, you climb, you fight, you horde meaningless loot that is always temporary and the world itself feels dead and non-reactive.
We need to forget the word "Open World" and demand higher levels of interactivity in games.
