The weapon breaking ideology almost made me put the game away more than once. I eventually got past that, but man, that's simply a maddening mechanic, in my opinion. Honestly, had I know about that in the first place, I may have avoided the Switch console entirely.
I bought the Switch and botw when they first became available. I played botw for maybe an hour and decided I really hated weapons breaking and shelved it until this past October.
I don't like the mechanic, but that alone is not game breaking enough for what is an otherwise fun game.
That all said, there are certain mechanics and other aspects of the game of which if any make a return in a sequel, will keep me from making a day 1 buy, if at all.
These are:
-The feeling that you don't need to do that much in-game to beat it. It's possible to skip tons of content and beat the game. This seems odd and unfulfilling to me.
-Introduce item abilities throughout the game, each of which must be earned, just like past Zelda games. Why? Because it's fun and creates a better sense of character progression. Botw gives away almost all abilities right from the start limiting exploration discoveries to materials and korok seeds which are too repetitive given the size of the game world should you choose to fully explore it.
-Weapon breaking - ugh, it's just awful and completely negates the "specialness" of the Master Sword and Shield when a) some weapons are more powerful and b) the master sword can become useless for a time and the shield can actually break. I have a lot of ideas that might work as I'm sure others do too.
-Shrines as the pathway to greater health and stamina - I really don't want shrines at all actually or at least have them extremely limited next time around. Replace with fewer, full sized dungeons that are all thematically different from one another. Shrines made mini-games of the games physics which is okay and fun for a bit, but there's not anywhere close to 120 shrines worth of fun in that.
-Can't see the game world most of the time (see my original post). Atmospheric effects can create nice ambient effects but they are way overused in botw and I felt I could hardly ever clearly see the beautiful world they created. The game quite literally gave me a number of headaches from my eyes perceiving this as "blurry" vision.
-Can't climb during the rain. This is okay for a time but it should be something the player can overcome at some point. I really thought some gear set would have allowed for climbing in the rain at some point but there is no such thing as it turns out. I spent a great deal of time waiting for rainstorms to pass because I worried that if I didn't climb the thing in front of me NOW that I'd forget about it and never do it later. So I sat and waited a lot for rain to pass. I'm not up for this again in botw2.
-Cumbersome crafting (botw NEEDS a recipe list for recipes you've discovered). Crafting in botw wild, unlike too many other games, is actually useful. But in a botw2 do I really want to a) open my inventory, b) individually select each ingredient, c) tap a button to toss them into the cook pan, d) watch the animation and e) do this over and over again for every single cooked item... no thanks. Once I discover a recipe, put it on a list and let me select it from the list - if I have the ingredients the item is made, if not, nothing happens.