Just minutes into the E3 2016 demo for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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But what’s new in this vast open world? Plenty. There’s a jump button (!) that Link can use to cling on surfaces and climb tall mountains. He can stealthily sneak up on enemies. Weapons and resources have to be collected out in the wilderness (and they can even break). A new tool that hangs on Link’s belt, called the Sheikah Slate, uses runes to give Link access to special abilities. He has to cook meals to regain health (and you can’t get hearts from slashing away at grass anymore). The list goes on and on.

Nintendo has made it clear for the past few years that it wanted to challenge series conventions and shake up the Zelda formula. And based on what we saw, they’re not kidding around. We got to spend 35-minutes and were blown away by the direction Nintendo is taking the next Legend of Zelda. Read on for our impressions along with quotes from the people working on this impressive wide-open adventure game.

A Wide, Wild World

The only thing we really knew going into E3 was that Nintendo wanted to craft an open world game and create a non-linear Zelda experience, one where players wouldn’t have to play a specific sequence of scenarios to advance the story. Creating such a large space presented a challenge from the start. “After Skyward Sword we really needed to develop a bigger world,” Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma told IGN, “but we've actually never done that. So a lot of it was trial and error, and we had to feel things out.”

Aonuma shared a few interesting facts about Zelda: Breath of the Wild and it’s wide-open landscape. Skyward Sword director Hidemaro Fujibayashi returns in the same role. The world is about 12 times the size of Twilight Princess. One minute of real-world time equals an hour of in-game time. Nintendo’s big E3 2016 demo, which is solely focused on one area called The Great Plateau, only represents one percent of the final game. But how would Nintendo go about filling up such a large space?

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“We talked a little bit about the idea of density, how dense to make this big world,” Aonuma explained. The team realized that filling the vast landscape with things to do and explore would be a lot of work. As the team experienced moving around on horseback or climbing up to a high place to paraglide down, they realized that their desire to see what's ahead of the next horizon grew. At the same time, the team realized some moments should be subtle as you explore. “We realized that it's OK if there's pocket of emptiness,” he said.

“ After Skyward Sword we really needed to develop a bigger world...

Our demo experience was packed with lots of discoveries. We found several small Bokoblin camps. We saw a sword driven into a stone that looked like the Master Sword from a distance, but it wasn’t. We found collectible materials in the form of acorns, Hylian mushrooms, apples, and other raw ingredients. We could climb trees using Link’s jump ability or even scale mountains. A depleting stamina bar indicates how long you can hold on, so climbing larger surfaces requires finding a ledge to stop and rest on.

We eventually stumbled on a Shrine, one of four dungeon locations in the demo, where Link can gather special spirit orbs that he needs to collect during his adventure or other treasure. Nintendo told us the final game will have more than 100 hidden in the game. These dungeons are a much more familiar element that continue the tradition of Zelda’s unique puzzle-solving formula. Aonuma told us that, despite the non-linear format of the overall game, dungeons will still have only one entrance. “If there were multiple entrances it would be very confusing,” Aonuma said, “but how you get to that entrance is very different this time around.”

In a hands-off demo we saw more surprises: Link stumbled into a boss-like rock monster called a Steepe Talus that crushed him in one hit. In order to chip away at this new foe’s massive health bar, Link had to get on the creature’s back and attack a weak point made of a darker-looking rock on its head. But the unrelenting creature had more attacks: It can toss boulders at Link if he tries to pick away at it with arrows (a strategy that backfired, so Nintendo’s rep decided it was time to run away).