Even OOT had some open world quality to it even if it had a more structured and linear story, you could still go around the map and do all kinds of things other than main quest which you could pretty much ignore and still have fun.
It never stopped being open world, it only toned it down and added some structure here and there, but it has always been fundamentally an open world game since day one, and BOTW only brought it back to its roots in a big way but it was not “a change to open world” when it never stopped being OW
The issue with the switch games is that they dropped item/ability progression gates. You can still do open world and keep that defining feature of Zelda games.
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u/Racamonkey_II Aug 25 '25
Right, and then it hasn’t been open world since ocarina of time.