Honestly my expectations have been set since 2019 that the selling point is "another open-world Zelda". BotW was unique in being the first true HD open-world Zelda so TotK was never going to be unique or be able to market that as its one 'thing'. I mean how have been sequels to other open-world games been marketed? From what I can tell it's usually "this time it's bigger" "new environments" "there's a different story". And that's what we've seen so far. I still think the world is the connective tissue, again, but recontextualized with verticality above and below. Beyond the premise of an open-world, BotW didn't show much connective tissue in its marketing, no mention of Divine Beasts or the various tribes you have to save beyond brief glimpses in a story trailer two months before release, and that's probably what they'll do again.
I think it's fair to be disappointed by them reusing the art style and the world map. And I get it, six years. For what it's worth, I don't think they've done a good job at making it obvious "here are caves" "here are underground areas" "the traversal is entirely seamless", I can tell from analyzing the trailers but it's not made glaringly obvious. If this were a different dev team I wouldn't be this accommodating or apologetic but they've actively documented their process on how they designed countless iterations of BotW's map to make exploration feel fun, so while this game could be a fuck up, the probability of that feels low.
