Yep, BotW is loaded with lore and story.
In the present you have 10 major communities (Kakariko Village, Hateno Village, Lurelin Village, Tarrey Town, Rito Village, Goron City, Zora's Domain, Gerudo Town, Kara Kara Bazaar and Korok Forest), and 15 stables for 25 communities total.
Each has its own cast of characters, and often journals and diaries to read on tables and shelves. Additional NPCs travel the roads, rest in camps, get into skirmishes with monsters, etc. All NPCs have names.
Likewise, there are countless items, armors, materials, meals and elixirs, each with their own icon and description, further fleshing out the world. You get a sense of the economy and culture, how these people live and work and dress and eat.
Then you open up the map - at a glance there are hundreds and hundreds of named locations, across a topography that makes geographical sense and is completely traversable, as is BotW's specialty.
You have around two-dozen fully voiced flashback scenes, but also additional scenes in the present at the Great Plateau, Kakariko, and the four homelands of the Champions. Those homelands undergo changes due to your actions - the Rito no longer live in fear of Medoh, Ruta's rain ceases in Zora's Domain, the sandstorm ends in the desert, etc. Dorephan, Sidon and the Zora elders achieve closure with Mipha; Riju gains the confidence to follow in her mother's footsteps (on a side note, she has her own 24-hour schedule spanning the throne room, bedroom, shrine and seal pen, Majora's Mask-style); and so on.
There's a subplot building your home in Hateno, and an entire racially diverse town you build from the ground up in Akkala. There are characters with connections across communities, like the Hateno man who married the Lurelin woman. There are recurring encounters with Kass that yield yet more lore. There are also things that inspire awe -- the three dragons, the Lord of the Mountain, the horse fairy.
You move faster in Hyrule Warriors, which accounts for the distance you cover more quickly, but the TGS stream noted how the Zelda team is making sure the modified maps generally align with BotW's map for authenticity.
Indeed, the countless ruins across BotW's Hyrule allow you to play archeologist. The official book "Creating A Champion" shows across 400+ pages the stunning level of thought that went into the placement of virtually every single detail.
For example, the book features two entire pages explaining the Akkala Citadel's purpose guarding a bottleneck from the coast to the mainland, repelling invaders from the eastern sea. It explains the three cannon battery placements and how their crossfire would stop invaders from reaching Central Hyrule, the river basin at the heart of the kingdom. It notes how the citadel did not anticipate an invasion from within the kingdom, however, so when the corrupted Guardians approached from the west, the soldiers who retreated there for Hyrule's last stand were doomed.
All of this world-building made BotW a richer experience than any Zelda prior, and now AoC will further mine those depths while adding additional detail. I trust BotW2 will do the same.
We are witnessing the Compilation of BotW -- like FF7, practically a series within a series -- and I'm all for it.
