Dragon Dogma and Dark Souls were pretty big influences BotW, though?
I honestly don't think either of them influenced BotW. I very much doubt the design team was even really aware of Dragon's Dogma - it was much-ignored.
The designers of BotW said Skyrim and Shadow of the Colossus were the primary influences, which is interesting. I can definitely see the latter - particularly in the movement and the bigger monsters, and the former I guess in the focus on physics and freedom of choice/direction.
Looking it up I see some sadly un-persuasive and reach-y arguments that Dark Souls influenced BotW, but I very much believe that's backfilling. What I think is more plausible and certainly is easier to support is Monster Hunter as another major influence. There's a ton of Monster Hunter-esque stuff and almost everything people try to claim was "Dark Souls-influenced" in BotW is easier to explain as Monster Hunter-influenced (you could actually claim MH influenced Dark Souls were it not for a clear line of descent from the King's Field games to Demon's Souls, long pre-dating MH).
Looking the other way, one sees a lot of weird claims that BotW influenced other games too which often require there to have basically been no open-world games before BotW. Like this ludicrous idiot-argument I just read that Horizon: Forbidden West only has gliders because of BotW, when in fact open-world and semi-open-world games have had gliders and similar in them for
decades (including really big ones where it was a major feature! Like Just Cause or Arkham Asylum). For a while every other open-world or semi-open-world game was to be forgotten and discarded, and we were to pretend BotW came up with every innovation, even ones from decades before it came out! I'm still bitter about an article I read a few years ago which listed all of BotW's supposed "innovations", and was just a giant list of stuff done first in other games - in most cases several other games, and done better in many of them! This was on IGN or something too! I can only assume it was written by a very young 20-something who did zero research. At least this idiocy seems to have died down significantly since BotW2 came out for whatever reason.
Hah, bought a Wii U to play BotW, anf got probavly around 500 hours out of 100% completing it, then bought it on Switch later to play it more. Honestly one of the greatest games ever made, couldn't possibly identify less with considering it boring.
I found it fascinating for like 5 hours, then I realized that I'd basically comprehended everything it was trying to do, and it was just a matter of execution. Combine that with me having absolutely no interest in the Zelda mythos post-A Link To The Past, the story being non-existent and me not vibing with the BotW aesthetic
at all (I mean, I was
impressed with it from a purely artistic perspective, but I didn't
like it - it didn't speak to me - only the pixel Zeldas did), and was just not into it. I thought, I guess I should keep playing, people
say it's amazing, maybe it'll pick up later, and then like 20 hours after that I was like "Ok, no, you've spent enough time on this, you're not having any fun, you're terminally bored, you were right you'd understood it after 5 hours, and are now repeating yourself in different forms and wishing for a fast-forward button rather than living in the world". Even then I lied to myself and said I'd come back to it later. I think if I'd played a lot fewer open-world games before it (I'd basically played all of them - since the 1980s and stuff like Damocles), and a lot fewer sandbox-y games, and maybe it had a different aesthetic, I'd have felt pretty differently.
I didn't even remember there was a Wii U version, interesting the things that get lost!
