Watched the first minute of that GameXplain video and found the framing so obnoxious I had to turn it off. So I can only assume that they talk about this as well lol.
It's a thing that happens when people have very different opinions from the majority and really want to express it. I get it, if you have a platform like a forum or especially a popular Youtube channel, you want to express yourself because you feel disjointed or at odds with the majority of people. You want people to understand you.
However, it's ruined because Andre has never been good at expressing himself (and is honestly just not that interesting), and the guy on the right they got a while ago enjoys having the opposite opinion from everybody else way too much. I'm not going to call them contrarian because it implies they have their opinions artifically or for disingenuous reasons, but they sure are too happy to dissent from everyone, and just aren't good content creators in general.
I have a lot of thoughts about the design philosophy of the open-air approach and I'm a little bit in agreement with Dishonored-director Raphaël Colantonio that BotW and by extension TotK play with immersive sim tropes but don't fully commit. In a MinnMax interview he used the segment in BotW where you need to enter Gerudo Town to illustrate his point: You really only have one way to enter (by dressing up as a woman) and the simulation stops when you try to do it differently. It flies in the face of the "do anything you want the way you want it" approach that is incorporated in almost every other element of the game. Now I didn't stop playing the game like Colantonio did but as a fellow fan of immersive sims I find stuff like that a tad bit disappointing.
I can't help but think that's ironic coming from the director of Dishonored. While Dishonored did allow for a lot of choices in many simulated environments, it was a game that was so aggressively easy that the ability for multiple choices in any given scenario over time started to feel diluted anyways. Most players would either end up using their overpowered abilities since they were so much more convenient than stealth, or they would try to use stealth only to use their powers the moment they were spotted anyways. I know that the idea of players capping themselves for challenge is pretty popular, but Dishonored is a pretty good example of how you need to balance your players' toolbox, because the whole concept of the game was made pointless by the balancing. Still, that doesn't make his point wrong, nor does that mean Dishonored isn't a fun game.
TotK, as much as I love it, feels more slapdash in its execution for a variety of reasons. On one hand it doubles down on the open-air stuff and gives you more tools to overcome or even circumvent certain roadblocks. But it also tries to combine it with the more linear and scripted segments of the previous games which require you to hit certain flags much more frequently. If you do that but don't do much to account for different approaches, your players are much more likely going to feel cheated when the game stops you even though you were playing it by its rules. The Rito segment with Tulin that balgajo mentions is a perfect example of this.
I think the biggest problem with Tears of the Kingdom was that very little of the basic makeup of Breath of the Wild felt like it was reconsidered. Which is funny, because from a programming and design perspective this is basically impossible given how hard it would be to implement Fuse and Ascend. There were some things that felt like responses to Breath of the Wild criticism, Fuse is sort of a response to weapon durability, there's more story-driven / linear sections, and there's more enemy variety (though I'm not convinced these last two points woulnd't have been true of a sequel regardless). But very little of the actual basic makeup or design. Like, we're two Open-Air games in and we still don't have dungeons that feel as naturally integrated into the world as the Dark World's forest dungeon from ALTTP. You might be able to get to those dungeons before activating story beats, but they still feel like they're populated in their own little corners of the world, rather than actually being in it. We still have a combat system that can quickly shift from being one of the most fun ever made in a third person game thanks to the amount of options at your disposal, the improvisational aspect of your toolset and enemy behavior, and the feedback being the best in the series since the rolling backstab from Wind Waker, to being a terrible combat system the moment you fight anything significanlty high-leveled or anything that feels remotely rigid. When you're supposed to take the combat system seriously as an action game and not as a toolbox system, it falls apart.
I say this not to drone on but because I think the linear sections are largely the same. In my mind they are so at odds with what make the game fun, and I think by the end of the game I actually considered them worse than Breath of the Wild's on average. Going into Gerudo Town to do a cool linear zombie horde section only for it to last 3 seconds isn't worth the gameplay interruptions in-between and is the epitome of disappointing. The Fire Temple tries to have design similar to linear games of years past, despite technically letting you play how you want and break the dungeon, but it doesn't work at all because the main gameplay gimmick is ... activating and rotating minecarts. The game superimposing cool linear scripted sequences onto the makeup of a sandbox game gave us the horrible jank of the Yunobo airplane mini-boss sequence, which didn't even have the decency to make the Wind Waker canon redesign cool (rip aesthetics, my beloved). As much as Breath of the Wild's linear story segments may have been technically at odds with the general design philosophy, they were at least cool and justified the breakup for the most part (heavy emphasis on that). None of the pre-dungeon gimmicks in Tears aside from the Super Rito Odyssey segment were as cool as the segments where you trail the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild.
I loved Tears of the Kingdom and already feel like replaying it. But I hope they reconsider this stuff going forward.
