Breath of the Wild's Influence Is Still Felt Five Years Later

gamerant.com:

It’s not often that a piece of media comes around that redefines how people think about its genre. Some older game genres like first-person shooters have seen multiple titles like this, including DOOM, Half-Life 2, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The open-world sandbox genre has certainly seen a few titles like this, particularly Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto 5, but it’s easy to forget how relevant these titles were now that most AAA games are trending toward larger worlds. Even so, there is still the occasional title that rises above the rest, and one of the biggest in recent memory is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Released for the Nintendo Switch and Wii U on March 3. 2017, Breath of the Wild had a lot riding on it. It was supposed to release earlier as the Wii U’s new Legend of Zelda, but a combination of factors pushed it back to the Switch’s launch. The Wii U’s hardware and software sales were falling short of expectations, and fan reception of Nintendo games was becoming lukewarm. Fortunately, Nintendo managed to strike big with the best-selling Zelda game ever, which also gave the Switch a strong start. While there are a lot of different opinions on the game’s changes to Zelda’s formula and the mechanics it introduced, the consensus is that Breath of the Wild raised the standard for open-world games. Looking back on the genre’s entries since then makes it clear that this was no idle declaration.

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One of Breath of the Wild’s greatest achievements was constructing an open world that felt full of things to do. Far too many games fall into the trap of making a giant world that ends up feeling too small thanks to a lack of diverse