The game is focused around providing the player freedom. From the moment you finish the tutorial you can go anywhere on the map, including straight to the final boss. But it’s not just about where you can go. They also spent a lot of time creating a highly robust physics system that would allow players to solve problems in creative ways. They also wanted it to feel intuitive so players would naturally experiment once they had an idea. Eg. Setting grass on fire to create an updraft and allowing a player to quickly gain height in combat or to solve a puzzle. This was incorporated into every aspect of the game and it creates a unique mix of simplicity and depth. Its tied to basically all the objects in the game, even in combat. You can actually swing a weapon to deflect a small rock thrown by a bokoblin, rather than it just being an attack that hits or misses. They also combined this with a robust cooking system that also encourages experimentation. They wanted you feel like a genius when the crazy idea you had actually worked.

Through interviews and videos I’ve seen, they spent a lot of time and effort to not have mechanics like a HUD arrow that guided you to the next objective, but rather had those in the landscape of the world simplifying the design, and creating a sense of curiosity. They also took care to put interesting side quests and hidden items along the way so that players felt like they discovered it on their own.

The boss and shrines being able to be completed out of order was a big departure from resent Zelda games proceeding it which were very linear, and they went back to the original Zelda for inspiration. This was controversial at the time, and not something new outside the series, but really forced the design of the open world to be inviting in some areas and terrifying in others.

To answer seriously, in my opinion it is the simplicity and accessibility that Nintendo baked into their game. There isn’t 10 different systems to learn, or 50 different skills, or even a skill tree. Nintendo made an open world game that was very light on the typical RPG elements that most open world games heavily feature and that made the game very easy for any casual person to pick up and play. This made a lot of sense considering Nintendo’s games are targeted at a more casual audience anyway. Now of course this was seen as a negative to the folks who want more mechanical depth in their games but the reality is the casual players still outnumber the more serious crowd and so as a result you hear more from the casual crowd who in turn enjoyed the game for it’s simplicity. There’s also the brand recognition tied to it. More people are likely to have played a Zelda game in the past and are familiar enough with the franchise to have wanted to go out and purchase the game. I’m sure there are some more in-depth and technical reasons why BotW succeeded they way it did but on a high level I believe these reasons account for a majority of the consensus.

They started with an IP that was hugely successful. It had done well in different formats including top-down, side-scroll, and 3D. Fully open world was the next big challenge for the Zelda franchise to meet, and it met it well. They marketed it as eliminating the loading screen, which was a big deal before SSDs removed that bottleneck.

It offered mechanics that weren’t really done like this game did, from temperature effects, to using physics that allowed you to create many things to solve puzzles or get through areas that should have probably been done other ways. People kept finding new ways to do things long after the game launched. It’s not very often you get a game that works like this and also so well.

Either remove the question mark and put the title in title case or insert the word “do” after “why.”

I think for 95% of Nintendo first party games, they’ll be a kid’s (or someone trying out new genres) first introduction to the genre or play style with added depth/challenge for people that are older/more experienced.

When you consider Luigi’s Mansion as someone’s first horror game, Mario Kart as someone’s first racing game, BoTW as someone’s first open world survival game, or Pokemon as someone’s first RPG - Looking at this ‘aimed at a new player’ angle, then their design and accessibility decisions make a lot more sense, and that generally makes the game popular because its so easy to play.

And of course a popular game is influential.

That also being said, post-BoTW, the glider has become pretty much a staple for the genre. I don’t think it was the first game to do it but you can definitely tell that many games copied BoTW’s implementation.

In short: many of those who say that have never played Shadow of the Colossus.

(In my opinion at least)

Because Nintendo fans deny any non-Nintendo games. And in the scale of Nintendo games it is quite… influential.