Time to make a Switch pun

[A Black Falcon]

So? The core of the fun in Zelda games isn't trying to figure out where to go, it's what you do once you're there! The puzzles, combat, dungeon exploration... those are the best things about Zelda. Seeing what you can do in the towns and exploring the world are great too, and are core parts of the experience, so long as I know what I should be doing next; seeing what you can do with your current abilities is great fun, so long as things are not TOO obtuse, as they haven't been since LttP.

And most of that, of course, is where BotW sounds not so great. Combat I've seen mixed opinions on, that the various physics things you can do are fun but the weapon degradation is terrible; that the combat system is good, but maybe you have fewer moves than before... and such. Dungeons are more de-emphasized than ever, disappointingly, and for me this is a big issue. Those ~120 shrines sound good though, but for a Zelda game to be great it needs dungeons, and not four but eight or more as my favorite Zelda games (LA, OoT, TP) have. As for puzzles, in the dungeons and shrines they look pretty interesting... but at the cost of most any puzzle elements in the overworld. Not sure what I think of that. And that instead of getting new items as you progress you pretty much just use four that you get at the beginning, sorry, I don't like that either; getting new items as you progress and figuring out how to use them is one of the many things I love about Zelda games, and just getting new weapons that will break in five seconds and some more health and stamina does not sound like a good replacement for that. I want to keep items! This is part of why I don't like Link Between Worlds' rental item system, just give me the items like usual, that's so much better! That would let you design the dungeons to be played sequentially instead of any order too, which is always the vastly superior design because it allows for proper difficulty scaling as you progress. ALBW does better with that than many games, sure (Elder Scrolls...), but that is a huge issue I have with that game... and then BotW goes even farther in the wrong direction, really. At least you keep the items this time, but there are so few! They do sound really interesting and very useful, so I'm sure I'd have fun with that in the game, but still, conceptually I have big problems with this idea.

[Now as an aside, as much as I do prefer more complex overworlds over empty spaces (LA v. LttP, and such) I did kind of wish that SS would have a bit more space in its maybe too dungeon-like overworld... or maybe the real problem is that it doesn't let you go to the sky and return to the point you left. I often really wanted to, say, go through a part of the overworld, then go back and do a side-quest or something, then go back and go to the next dungeon... but you can't do that because you can only return to three specific points in the overworld. It's really annoying and forces you into overly long periods where you can't return to the sky, because if you do you'll need to go back through everything you went through again and I am NOT going to do that if I don't have to. But anyway, the other issues I'd probably have with BotW I've been over, from crafting to the aimlessness of open-world games...]

But yeah, in 3d Zelda games (before BotW of course), as much as I love most everything about the games, my overall favorite parts of the games are the dungeons. They are where 3d Zelda games are at their best. So I can't identify at all with your complaint here about being told where to go, because that guidance helps you get to the next dungeon, which is certainly a very good thing! Being lost in games is the worst... in a dungeon it can work since you have limited options, but an overworld is far too large for that kind of design. And in those dungeons, 3d Zelda games almost always do a good job of showing where you should go, either obviously or subtlety. It's really masterful work. 2d Zelda games have great dungeons too, but I have always thought that OoT's dungeons were impressive in a way that 2d Zelda dungeons never have been, and though several 3d Zelda games have too few dungeons (WW, MM), at least the ones they have are mostly pretty great. There are a lot of exceptional things about the best Zelda games, including their graphics, music, controls, game design, the worlds you explore, and such, but on top of the basic mechanics, the dungeons are probably the next most important thing.