The Legend of Zelda is one of Nintendo’s most iconic franchises, but it’s far from the company’s most commercially successful series. It’s not exactly a sales slouch: over 30 years, Nintendo has sold more than 75 million Zelda games. But those numbers pale in comparison to some of the company’s biggest hits. The original Wii Sports, for instance, is Nintendo’s best-selling game, moving more than 82 million copies since its debut in 2006. But even still, Zelda commands a level of respect that goes beyond just sales numbers, as it reaches a dedicated group of players who follow Nintendo from console to console. People get more excited about a new Zelda announcement than just about any other video game.

Ross Miller Ross Miller

At E3, those devoted fans were treated to a game that looks very different from past Zelda adventures. While it features familiar elements and the same protagonist, Breath of the Wild modernizes the Zelda formula in a lot of ways. It takes place in a vast open-world, one where you're free to explore however you like, with no predefined path looming in front of you. There are elements of crafting — you can build new weapons from gathered resources, and cook food to replenish your health — as well as survival features that add a touch of realism. Link now has to worry about the weather, for instance, as extreme heat and cold will affect him unless he changes clothes. He also has to think about noise for the first time: if you want to hunt an animal, you’ll need to sneak up on it and approach quietly, lest your dinner run away.

These aren’t exactly groundbreaking features, as crafting elements and open-worlds have become staples of blockbuster games in recent years. But for Zelda — a slowly evolving series where nearly every game follows the same basic formula — these additions mark a huge shift. I played around 45 minutes of Breath of the Wild, and it feels remarkably different than any other game in the series. Instead of just following a set path, I was able to go basically anywhere I wanted, and I often found myself distracted by running animals and enemy encampments. I spent a lot of time taking down bad guys and pillaging resources at the expense of the story. While some of the changes are big, even small details altered how I played; I couldn’t just swing my weapon wildly like I usually do in Zelda, as it degraded with every use. I had to actually think about what I was doing, and plan accordingly.

Fils-Aime believes that these changes were necessary to introduce the series to new players who haven’t grown up with the many iterations of Hyrule over the years. "The Zelda formula is well known," he says. "You continue down a path, you battle in a dungeon, you get an item, you’re going to need that item for the next dungeon, and so forth. We think that for today’s player... that formula potentially needed to be upended — that we needed to introduce new elements in order to bring new players in. But we needed to do it thoughtfully in order to maintain the current player."