Lol, I don't think I ever answered what my hopes out of BotW 2 were when I made this thread. So original context which I brought up in the OP: I made this thread after we did a staff feature on the frontpage about what we were hoping for out of BotW 2 back in 2020. We've had one other version of this article that released a few months ago, and my hopes out of the game have evolved since the original article was published.
Originally my hope was we'd get more expansion on the motives of Calamity Ganon, and more info on how Ganondorf turned into Calamity Ganon.
A few months ago my hope devolved to basically, please, please, please just let BotW 2 have a good story, if it was delayed because they are fine tuning a half interesting story, I'm happy, because I'm already sure the gameplay is going to be solid no matter what, but if they took this long and couldn't make a decent story, I'd be pretty disappointed.
Here we are a few months later, and my hopes slipped even further. I just want to game to release next year, that's all, and I'm hoping it has just anything that makes it unique. At this point I don't think a re-hash of BotW, even if it has some new settings, is going to be enough, this game is going to need something that makes it stand out in order for me to feel like the wait has been worth it. New gameplay mechanics, a lot of new areas, maybe even places we've been but they are altered enough to be interesting, maybe even explorable underground areas. Give me a lot of new content, basically.