I mean, it was an interview promoting Twilight Princess HD, so I'm not really surprised he said "And if you like this game, well the next Zelda game coming out is just like it!" Not a very compelling argument without any explanation of what that connection supposedly is.
What do you think the connection is? What does TP do that BotW really picks up on? Not a rhetorical question. I know there's some talk about the topography of the map being similarly up and down, but beyond that I'm not sure what Aonuma might be referring to.
Yeah, while I think that's a cool development note (map reuse), the quote is biased by being plucked from an interview literally marketing TP: HD. Similar quotes can be plucked from WWHD and SSHD's marketing, which all utilize the same "please look forward to the next title, and relive the series' history in X". Each game innovated somewhere that BOTW carries forward - TP in world design, WW in open nature and art style (which similarly was used during development), SS in mechanics...
I think the most clear representation of why I view LoZ -> WW -> BoTW as a clear development on one another is the original introduction video from E3 2014 where Aounuma literally references both of those game to introduce BoTW. This is divorced from any need to market another title, and was our true first look at Botw.
Right, so I've finally got a moment to make the detailed replies I wanted to these, discussing the overworlds. And now, I'm going to start it with a controversial statement.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (and it's map) is just as linear as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
Alright, alright, put down the pitchforks.
What do I mean by that? Let me answer that with another question: At what point exactly in the Wind Waker do you think it lets you actually explore the overworld?
Obviously it's not the beginning when you're on outset island, and then moved via cutscene to the first dungeon, which concludes with another cutscene throwing you to the next island, Windfall.
Here you get a sail, but the wind only blows east, so you can only go one direction, to Dragon Roost.
When you get there, the king of red lions hands you the Wind waker, but won't let you go anywhere until you complete Dragon Roost islands dungeon and get the pearl. Surely then, with the ability to control the wind, you can go anywhere?
Nope. If you try and deviate at all from the path either back to Windfall from dragon roost (directly west) or going anywhere but directly south, towards the Forest haven, the King of red lions immediately stops you and tells you not to go anywhere but where he told you. This continues until the forest haven is cleared.
This means you need to have gotten through 3 of the games 7 dungeons before you can actually visit anywhere on the map.
The problem I have with this is, if you look at the list of places you've been forced to visit before actually opening the map, it contains every single major point of interest on the map.
The natural question then is, "Why did they do this?". The answer? Well, first I want to point out that the previous two games happily let the player wander over huge chunks of the map practically immediately, even before the first dungeon in the case of MM, which has the best overworld prior to BOTW, but that's a unimportant deviation from this discussion. But I mention this just to make it clear that, going in to WW, they didn't think there was a major objection to exploration of the world even if it meant you were deviating from the main questline, so, again why?
The answer is a solution to a problem caused by the ocean. You cannot naturally guide the player to things due to the very nature of it. It is not possible for you to have routine major landmarks or points of interest on what is by the very definition a large empty area where for large amounts of time, there will not be anything in the vision range of the player, certainly not close enough to have the player be able to discern "That looks interesting, I should go that way and see what that is". This is why the Wind Waker has to force the player to go to all the major locations of interest on the map before letting you explore, because otherwise, you'd have a much more difficult time being able to find them.
So then, once you've got to that point in the story, they can at least open it up a little for the content that's left, right? The rest of the game goes roughly Greatifsh isle (Where the game again makes it a bad idea to actually explore until you do a significant chunk of the main quest to dispell the storm) > Back to Windfall to visit the pirates in the storm > Back to outset to get the 3rd pearl > To the tower of the gods and getting the master sword >Back to the forsaken fortress > Dragon roost and forest haven to do the Earth and Wind temples to power up the master sword (And again, the game refuses to let you choose the order you do these in, by preventing Makar from appearing until you've cleared the Earth one, even though there's no good reason for this). Again, you'll note that other than the tower of the gods, everywhere of interest is where the game already forced you to visit previously before actually letting the map be explored.
And then, we get to the one point of the game where it actually wants you to explore the ocean.
The Triforce quest.
And there's the problem; the one point of the game where you're actually expected to do some exploration of the overworld is pretty much universally considered the low point of the game. I'll come back to why this is in a moment, but that's Wind Waker summarized for now.
What about Twilight princess? Everyone agrees that the map here is also heavily linear, so I'm not going to spend as much text on this, but as a summary. You start in Ordon, do the forest temple, head up through eastern hyrule field, get turned in to a wolf and teleported to the castle where you meet Midna, escape back to Hyrule field, head to Kakariko and then Death mountain, continuing anticlockwise around the map, first stopping at to Hyrule castle town and then continuing south to Zoras domain in just as linear a fashion as Wind wakers first 3 dungeons, at which point you're free to explore the map at your leisure again. The rest of the game again largely consists of revisiting these areas you've already explored, with the other segments of the map being more disconnected in the case of TP (the Sacred grove; Gerudo Desert; Snowpeak ruins; Old kakriko village) and a couple of small islands on WW that are part of the triforce quest, otherwise everything is optional. You also get a crappy search quest at the end of TP, but for some reason I can only speculate at, it's not really hated as much as the WW Triforce search (...probably because the dominion rod quest is much shorter?)
At this point in both games, you've seen pretty much all the major landmarks, barring some small places which have upgrades that you may want to collect (...though both games are simple enough that you don't really need them), with similar lists of things scattered through the overworld including heart pieces, item bags/upgrades (heart pieces, bomb bags, quiver,wallets in both games, some armour in TP, various combat upgrades in TP, and the giant spin attack and magic meter upgrade in WW) as well as a bunch of combat challenges (TP makes most if not all of them mandatory as part of the story however, whereas the big octo boss battles are option in WW) and a handful of minigames in both cases. The actual amount of content on the overworlds is pretty much identical, but I'm going off track from what the actual question I was going to answer was; restating it as I would ask it, because this is already a lot of text.
"How did the overworlds of the games The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess influence that of Breath of the Wild?"
I'd say honestly; not so much for either of them, neither game does a good job of trusting the player can find their way through the overworld the first time with being dragged through with little deviation on path. As has been well documented, they looked further back to the original Zelda game more than anything for inspiration, especially than the latter three 3D zeldas (including Skyward Sword), which were all terrified of letting the player make meaningful choices about how to proceed (OOT and especially MM were more open about this). If anything, that mistake was the major lesson that BOTW drew from all 3 of the games, and I don't think you can end up with BOTW without first having all 3 games and understanding what does and doesn't work.
Basically as I short summary, I think the zelda teams thoughts on each game would have gone something like:
Lessons I think they learned from Wind wakers overworld:
It's possible to scatter content intermittently over a larger map and people will be happy enough with it. It can be surprisingly sparse.
However the moment you force the player to do it (triforce quest), they'll hate it, even if they largely were liking it up to that point.
The style of open world that can be created primarily with an ocean sucks from a design perspective. By it's nature, you cannot appropriately guide the player to points of interest without invisible walls and otherwise forcing them; this needs to be rectified somehow and would be extremely difficult in a setting where you cannot presume the player can always see something of interest.
In addition, the method of transport is very passive. In the original, in order to even change your direction when travelling, you had to stop, play a song, choose one of 8 directions, hope you can get close enough with that direction, and then ... just wait. That's not engaging for a player at all. This is much more easily fixed on land where you can have all sorts of geometry and guide the player from point to point while having that be reasonable.
Lessons from Twilight princess overworld:
An active transportation method is way more involving for the player; it doesn't have to be horses, but you can see how the moment to moment gameplay of exploration in TP is far closer than it is in wind waker, where the player is guided by something that's actually in their visual range to head towards, and then has to actively move Link there instead of picking a direction and waiting. They obviously went even further with making everything climbable.
With the same technology, it's possible to create a much more densely packed overworld on the first travel through, which is better
but (and this is a big but) once you've gone through the e.g. boss fights in hyrule field and cleared the resulting enemy encampment or cave; without respawning them it becomes super empty. They kind of got away with it in Wind Waker because it was largely empty to begin with, but it's probably the most common and significant of complaints about TP. This'll be how ideas for things like the blood moon came about.
You can on the other hand trust the player will get to the points of interest eventually even if they get distracted, so it's now OK to put other things nearby, they won't get disorientated, if you've put it on the horizon and know the player can always see it; this is why whenever you hit a larger open area of TP, the goal is something tall. The game is largely linear up to Hyrule Field, at which the game doesn't tell you where to go, but the entrances to other areas are highlighted by converging rock walls, one which has Hyrule castle beyond (you can always see it!), which isn't where you're heading, and you were explicitly told to head towards the nearest Twilight wall, which again, peers over the horizon and can be seen no matter where you are. It does this again from Kakariko, where from a high vantage point you can see Death mountain, which is the next new area you have to head to, and consistently does this throughout the map, even if it probably didn't need to due to the strict linearity. This obviously was way more important in BOTW (and simply the geometry wasn't enough, when they imported the map, it would have lost those hidden things shown outside the play area between loading screens, and then they had to make more landmarks for travel, which they did using a map of Kyoto per that early interview).
Anyway, that's my rambling done; I don't think the overworld of WW influenced BOTW very much at all, certainly not alone; like they've said on several occasions, looking back at the original with its densely packed map did far more than any of the other games in the series.
