Your Minecraft character doesn’t grab the side if a steep mountain and climb it. You have to place blocks and jump up them. Or have a ladder etc.
The end goal is the same. Climbing a mountain which you so focus on. You as well can create any mountain you want and you can destroy any mountain you want. You literally have full agency over the world.
Assassins Creed/Horizon have specific grabbing points you must use when climbing at least on the ones pre BoTW not sure about the newer Assassins Creed.
In Origins/Odyssey you can climb basically anything. All landscape is scalable.
The mechanics themselves aren’t entirely new how they were all molded together into the same game is what makes it new and innovative. No game did all of those things in the same game before.
They all did, the only difference here is botw focusing on a few features while sacrificing others. Sure it's more interactive, sure it has more ways to kill your enemies creatively. However at the same time it looks worse, is not so map and story dense and sacrifices other things. Again what you prefer is subjective, but this is not what was discussed.
I mean that’s your opinion. I personally find Skyrim very boring. The combat is so lack luster and everything lacks impact. I don’t care how much is in the game if it’s boring to play. I gave Skyrim a week beat the main story it was a 6/10 and the side quests I did try weren’t enjoyable either. Most people will disagree with that but I didn’t enjoy it. Same thing with the Witcher. The gameplay was so off putting the rest of the game couldn’t keep me enticed enough to keep playing. Horizon i actually finished it was a solid 7.5 nothing glaringly bad with the game but nothings outstanding either. To me personally when I played BoTW I couldn’t put it down. It was just a joy to play and traverse the world. Is it my favorite open world game anymore? No. I believe Elden Ring is as perfect the open world formula has been done because I love that style of game. You probably would say Elden Ring isn’t innovative for the same reasons you say BoTW isn’t. It’s “just Dark Souls but open world” but that in itself is innovative since it hadn’t been done before.
Cool. What all of this has to do with "best game" argument? You literally just said it's probably not even your favorite game, yet you arguing for a person who said it is. Ok the only objective merit of the game is units sold. Is bofw best sellimg game? No. There we have it. It's not "best game" anything.