For the sake of this post, I'll give you a quick run-down for those who are wondering:
- "open world" basically means that a particular game world is explorable by the player's initiative. This is typically done without any story-related or character-progression barriers.
- "sandbox" essentially means that the player is given tools to play however he or she wishes.
It's very common for sandbox games to be open world but the two aren't necessarily inclusive. "Scribblenauts" being a prime example. The Legend of Zelda, on the other hand, is one of those series that is traditionally open world without being a sandbox. Sure, one can decide to muck around and terrorize chickens but most of the player tools (if not all) revolves around combat and solving puzzles in dungeons... and those are traditionally linear. You can't do anything else.
Open world sandbox games used to be more or less exclusive to the PC gaming category due to the hardware limitations that most consoles had and still (technically to some extent) have to this day. Putting memory and processing power aside, before the industry learned of the concept of "contextual controls" where a single button could do various actions, consoles couldn't handle what the PC had roughly 84 buttons for.
With that out of the way:
The Elder Scrolls series has been one of the best video game series of that type. I fell in love with the series starting with Oblivion and that, in turn, introduced me to other similar games like Morrowind, Two Worlds, the Witcher and Skyrim. Here's the thing, though: I got my Nintendo Switch (my first "home console" aside from the GameGear and the 3DS; that could be another topic on its own, really) earlier this month and I've been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on it... I mean, what else could I possibly be playing on it right now?
Anyways, I've played other Zelda games before (The original, Link's Awakening, Link to the Past and Link Between Worlds) but it's not until Breath of the Wild that I've started to compare the series to the Elder Scrolls'... or maybe it's just THAT one game. I always associated the Zelda series as an action-oriented variant on the adventure "King's Quest"-type of games. You find items, use them to solve puzzles, give other items to NPCs, progress, etc... and it's on a top-down perspective rather than a side view.
I wouldn't go as far to say that Breath of the Wild is a better open world sandbox games than the Elder Scrolls series ever was; they're more or less trying to achieve different things... but it's definitely better than Skyrim. Physics and chemistry mechanics aside (which is more or less a product of improved technologies), everything you do in Breath of the Wild feels intuitive. From the way the game teaches you how to play, to the way you gather and cook food, to how you solve puzzles. A very stupid (yet appropriate, I find) way of describing it is: it's like playing Oblivion which has fluid game-play, interesting stories and characters, intuitive design but without the game explicitly telling you where you should go.
That's the conclusion I came to earlier today: Zelda Breath of the Wild is to Skyrim what Oblivion is to Skyrim... just without the quest markers.
Zelda has the added benefit of being development by a dev team that understands what "polish" means. C'mon Bethesda, step it up a notch! Blizzard Entertainment is too bloated and drunk to understand this, don't you fail me too!
If the next Zelda game turns out to be in first-person view and features a crime mechanic; the Elder Scrolls series is going to have a monster of a competitor to shake off.
