Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don't forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Not a bad game per se, but I don't get the hype behind it. Sure the dungeons are fun but the world is so lifeless, the story non existent, the combat pretty shallow, the tower climbing is very much like FarCry but for some reasons it's okay here while Ubisoft gets the blame...like I said I dont get why the game is so beloved. Never finished it after the 20 hour mark and probably never will.
Red Dead Redemption 2 - Just like Zelda not a bad game, but imho highly overrated. Graphics and and atmosphere are amazing but the controls are clunky and overloaded, nearly everybody is an unlikable douchebag who I would love to shoot myself at the first opportunity (maybe except Jack and Abigail) but I have to root and care for them. The game is just so long and feels very stretched, you already know that you won't get Dutch because it's a prequel and for an open world game you often get handholded in your weapon selection or things you can do because you have to wait for them to be unlocked by the game. I'm now nearly done with the game, playing the epilogue at the moment and I would say the last chapters are more entertaining than the rest of the game, but I still can't understand why this game was on so many game of the year lists and I really wanted to put the controller down a dozen times.
So there they are, two highly controversial oppinions by me and now I'm really curios what your takes are and how highly I get downvoted into oblivion ๐
Zelda breath of the wild - it's one of the worst Zelda games I've ever played and I've played so many. There were so many bad decisions made with this game from weapons breaking to getting rid of traditional dungeons. It's a great open world game but a terrible Zelda game.
The Horizon series by Guerilla Games - These games are good for the most part, however they suffer from long stretches of boring open world where you have to fight robot dinosaurs with underpowered weapons. The whole point of the combat is to find weaknesses with the enemies and exploit/attack those weaknesses, but the game never at any point explicitly explains that concept or focuses on that concept. It expects you to just understand what to do. Not to mention the absolutely stupid grinding for mats to make new weapons and armor. Melee combat is terrible, the story for the most part is pretty good but man does it take forever to pick up, it overstays it's welcome. They are technical powerhouses but just so grindy and boring.
I agree with all you said about Zelda BOTW. As a Zelda game I was really disappointed. But if you set aside the Zelda part it was actually a pretty fun game for me. I really enjoyed the exploration and it was the best open world game I played so far. But too easy forgettable dungeons and too easy bosses and darn weapons breaking really bothered me so I'm not even interested in the TOTK. I'll wait for the next Zelda game and keep my fingers crossed.
Pretty sure they've stated Zelda games will lean closer to the two recent entries going forward, so those of us who think like this really can only cross our fingers that something resembling previous Zelda titles returns.
What I love about the Zelda games is that they try out something new with each title. So who knows, maybe they'll eventually do a Zelda that's geared more to fans of the older titles.
Weapon breaking is controversial but I see it as a mechanic with positive impact on the game. Just because your weapons were not permament it actually added choice into which weapon do you want to use in the battle
It does not add any choice. All it did was encourage me to speed run my way to the master sword and essentially go down the line of weapons I had in a boss fight until I ran out. There was no strategy, just a sense of never wanting to use any of the good weapons and hoarding them. It was so bad I marked a spot on the map where weapons would respawn every blood moon so I could at least have some good weapons. Guess what that's called in every other game? A repair mechanic. Don't even get me started on the master sword "breaking" for no thematic reason.
I'm on the disagree side on this. As much as I did use whatever garbage the game threw at me, there was no incentive to use your best weapons tactically, because unless you were fighting a boss, breaking a good weapon would not bring an equivalent reward... and then the major bosses were weak to the Master Sword anyway.
It also felt incredibly unrewarding to explore and open chests only to find yet another disposable weapon rather than some permanent upgrade like the heart pieces used to be.
Around the time I felt like Horizon Zero Dawn did more to encourage smart use of multiple weapons than Zelda did, by giving them different funcions and making it so enemies had different defenses and weak spots.