I have the quest to do what
@Zero is talking about, but I went back onto the main questline before doing it. I'll have to go back and do it sooner than later, sounds like it was exciting! I've got another SUPER AMAZING quest to go back to as well, we'll definitely be talking about it quite a bit once we all finish the game, haha.
Did mostly side-stuff tonight, which was a lot of fun. Finished up some side missions around a town I was at recently, and figured out how to solve a previous side quest in a really awesome way. Sure, I probably did more than I needed to, but the extra detective work that I did made it a lot more fun to solve. Again, I love -- LOVE -- that the information to complete a lot of these quests is there for you to find and figure out on your own, without the game holding your hand constantly.
Big chunk of what I did tonight was explore a region that I skipped over (it was sandwiched between main story quests, so I deemed it "less important" at the time), but so far I'm finding a lot of good stuff there. And hell, so much for not being important -- a random NPC I talked to gave me a pretty nice little nugget of info as to where I might find a
very important sword. That's the great part about BotW though -- it's not clear if this is *A* important sword or *THE* important sword (I'm crossing my fingers that it's the latter, but either way, something else to look forward to).
@ZeroFor me, the biggest takeaway is that there's not a clear drop in quality in terms of game design, or level design, or polish with the shift to open-world. It has the consistent quality of a Zelda game that you'd expect, but on a much more gargantuan scale. Most open-world games aren't like that. And I've put probably 50+ hours into the game, and I've yet to run into a single glitch or anything that I'd consider "janky". No floating NPCs or anything. Maybe others have, but I haven't. The level of polish at this scale is remarkable.
Another thing that's really working for me is that the world still has strong, memorable level design, especially the further away you get from the Plateau. I fully explored games like Witcher 3 and GTA V, but you could drop me at a random point on the map and I probably couldn't tell you immediately where I am. A lot of open-world games don't really end up establishing a strong sense of place for me, as a result. They feel like worlds that exist for them to put stuff in, but the world design itself comes across more as window-dressing, a means to an end. In Zelda, the world design is really crucial to the experience and I really feel like a part of it, and that's only getting stronger the more I play of it.
"New standard in open-world" I think is accurate. BotW really takes advantage of being "open" in ways that a lot of other open-world games do not, and I'm not seeing the drawbacks. If anything, the Zelda series is really going to benefit from it.