my favorite thing about the game unlike tsushima, HZD, RDR2, and others is that the environments feel alive and interactive. If you hit something it will react in the way you expect it to. Whether its a tree, water, grass, food, enemies, animals, things have personality and link can effect them.
In a lot of other games it feels like the truman show where everything is just cardboard cutouts and dont react at all to the players. The environments feel very static. Like how in Tsushima you can't cut bamboo outside of the bamboo mini-game. Or in HZD water doesn't splash when you fire an arrow into it and animals just run through it.
BOTW feels like the type of game where i you see something you can go climb it or shoot it, or pull it up and find something to do with it. It's how an open world game should be, OPEN. Oh thats a cool volcano, let me build up my stamina to try and climb up the side of it and see whats in it.