There have been games that showed hints of stuff you could get to, but I think BOTW was the first major open world game that actually universally followed that rule and didn’t have invisible walls all over the place.
Like Skyrim there was a lot you could “climb” by abusing the mechanics and spamming jumps until you got lucky, and everything existed in that sense. But it was glitches, not part of the mechanics. BOTW having points of interest almost entirely discovered visually was unique.
I feel like “See that mountain? You can go there.” was already a cliche when the game came out. [Though I have no citation to prove it.]
BotW really delivered on it though, with everything being climbable as the rule rather than the exception.
There have been games that showed hints of stuff you could get to, but I think BOTW was the first major open world game that actually universally followed that rule and didn’t have invisible walls all over the place.
Like Skyrim there was a lot you could “climb” by abusing the mechanics and spamming jumps until you got lucky, and everything existed in that sense. But it was glitches, not part of the mechanics. BOTW having points of interest almost entirely discovered visually was unique.