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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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The only one that I know that really gets compared to BoTW is Genshin Impact.
Which, it kind of is in terms of exploration. They even added Korok seeds in their 3.0 update.
The big bad enemies are also ancient robots that can be terrifying when you’re low level too.
This game came out the tail end of 2020. It also has a very similar color palette to BotW in some areas. Especially the main “Castle Town” zone.
I would say the defining characteristic that sets Breath of the Wild apart from its contemporaries is its "chemistry engine", as they call it. That meticulously programmed system of interactions where absolutely everything in the world affects everything else in ways that are intuitive. Wooden objects burn, lightning strikes metal things, fire will melt ice, electrified objects will conduct through metal and water, etc. That, in tandem with its cel-shaded artstyle, minimalist piano flourish soundtrack, and general lonely, somber vibe in a mechanically lush but socially empty world. That's the identity of BotW.
I haven't played Genshin Impact so I don't know how deep the similarities are. It sure superficially resembles BotW if you squint and look at it from a distance. Big open world, vibrant cel-shaded graphics, live in-overworld combat, you can climb walls and soar with glider physics, they got the high fantasy plus inexplicably advanced magitech thing going on... definitely some marks on the bingo card, but not really things particularly unique to BotW, either. I have no idea how much Genshin Impact actually resembles BotW up close.
It's traversal. The interactions were cool, but mostly about the puzzles.
What BOTW changed was how exploration works. You see a landmark in the distance, start moving towards it, and figure out how to get there. There's nothing you see that isn't part of the traversal system. There are no invisible walls. Some things are absurdly high to climb, some things are slippery, etc, but everything you struggle to traverse is clearly a product of the systems the game uses and makes sense.
(The problem was none of that exploration got you anywhere interesting, but the core element of "everything you see is a destination" is the thing about BOTW that was groundbreaking.)
I feel like "See that mountain? You can go there." was already a cliche when the game came out. [Though I have no citation to prove it.]
BotW really delivered on it though, with everything being climbable as the rule rather than the exception.
There have been games that showed hints of stuff you could get to, but I think BOTW was the first major open world game that actually universally followed that rule and didn't have invisible walls all over the place.
Like Skyrim there was a lot you could "climb" by abusing the mechanics and spamming jumps until you got lucky, and everything existed in that sense. But it was glitches, not part of the mechanics. BOTW having points of interest almost entirely discovered visually was unique.
Genshin has a 7 elements system that partially does what you describe: Wood (or anything made of or affected by dendro) burns when exposed to fire (pyro), fire melts ice (cryo) and vaporizes water (hydro), water conducts (well, causes a damage reaction with) electricity (electro), etc. The outliers are stone (geo) which makes forcefield shields with some of the other elements, and air (anemo) which swirls up and spreads and reacts together some of the other elements.