Botw is a great Zelda game. It's worth a play through by any fan of the series. The game does so many things right but sadly does some things wrong too.
Since Ultima VII, one of my favorite things for a game to have is a seamless world that has a bit of world simulating going on with it. Botw is both seamless (for the most part) and includes great mechanics, fun physics, and meaningful cooking which all have a world simulating effect that is enjoyable and intuitive. Also, it's worth noting that the seamlessness, mechanics, and physics are competently implemented - they all work everywhere to a fault. Swen of Larian talks many times about mechanics that "just work" everywhere you use them - botw does exactly that. The game engine is solid, competent, and bug free (I experienced zero bugs while playing or if there was a bug I didn't notice).
The size of the game world is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it's a BIG game. Tons of locations along with an overall art direction that is eye candy which motivates you to explore every nook and cranny to find just one more treasure or one more secret. The map too is very well done with different scales so you can zoom in and out with great detail. Though you can't put notes on the map, the game gives you two ways to mark the map with either icons or "pins."
The bad of all this is that though there is a good bit of variation in the game, there just isn't enough variation given the size of the map. By variation I mean different things a player can do to engage the environment while exploring. If you really want to fully explore the game world before completing the story of the game, it becomes a bit of a slog. If you just follow the main quests and beat the game in a dozen or so hours, this is less of an issue because you will not have explored anywhere near the full map (in any meaningful way anyhow) in just a dozen hours or so hours.
When it comes to combat, I'm in the camp that doesn't like the weapons breaking all the time. I found it annoying and just not very fun. That is admittedly my own subjective point of view. I'd rather this mechanic not be repeated but if it is it's not a game changer - I'd still play another Zelda despite this.
I put about 100 hours into this game over two months - played it all of October and November. So I certainly liked the game. But the thing that gnaws at me is this feeling that I could have beat the game dozens of hours sooner if I wanted to. What I don't like about that is this feeling that there's a lot you can do in this game but a lot of it really doesn't matter. Explore all 120 shrines? That's great but you don't need to explore many to beat the game.
What I liked about past Zelda games is that progression was tighter along with a tighter narrative. It's tough to do this in an open world game, but the absence of a stronger feeling of progression and tighter narrative leaves a sour taste after beating the game. This is why Wind Waker is one of my favorites - it has a good compromise between "open world," progression, and narrative.
I also hope future Zelda games, should they follow the open world precedent set by botw, will largely forget about using a bunch of shrines to build up hearts and stamina. It was okay I guess in this one iteration of Zelda but I really wouldn't want to have it that way in another Zelda game. Like others, I prefer fewer but more detailed dungeons with their own themes and little to none of the "samey" shrines and ancient beasts. I'll probably never replay botw because the idea of building up hearts/stamina by completing shrines to the extent where I could survive an encounter with a Lynel just isn't appealing to me.
Another aspect of the game that slowly widdled away my patience while playing was the overuse of atmospheric effects. Mostly, players want to be able to see the game world. Atmospheric effects are great, but they are way overdone in botw to the extent that 80% of the time I was having a real hard time seeing the game world. It should be the other way around where I can see the game world 80% of the time. There was high contrast, lens flare, cloudiness, rain, fog, smoke, night time… all of which are okay and welcome but not to the extent implemented in botw. I had a few sessions where I actually developed a headache from straining to see the game world. That all said, botw had a fantastic draw distance, whenever the atmospheric effects would abate and let you see it.
Cooking is useful in the game but the devs don't respect the player's time when they don't include a recipe book for you in the UI. The devs give you this huge game world that you can get lost in for 100s of hours if you want along with a meaningful cooking mechanic but a) they won't make the UI remember successful recipes b) you have to go into the UI and individually select ingredients and c) they want you to watch the cooking animation over and over again. It's all just way to cumbersome. Not a huge gripe but I hope if they have cooking in a future game that the UI will help you out by creating a recipe list once you've discovered a food item and just let you pick from that list instead of having to always remember which ingredients are for which food item along with the cooking animation (which yes, you can bypass but you'll still see a little of it regardless).
Another worthy mention is this - I get this feeling that the devs spent much of their development time creating the wonderful game engine they built for botw, but found themselves with too little time to populate it with enough variation given the size of the map.
If rumors are true that the next Zelda game will essentially be botw2 (same game world) it's okay with me if the development time is largely spent on making their huge game world with enough variation throughout to make the time you spend in it feel important and meaningful as opposed to "well you can do this and that if you want but you don't have to."
More quests, better quests, quests more tightly interwoven with the overall narrative and plot of the game, less shrines, more varying dungeons, progression of hearts/stamina done a different way than shrines, weapons you can keep and use so that you can develop your own fighting style. Perhaps not introduce all abilities so quickly and have the player find them gradually via quests or just something else to search for besides the 900th korok seed.