Last week at E3 2016, Nintendo finally gave the world a deeper look at The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

see deal The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Wii U $59.88 on Walmart

the new Zelda game that's coming to Wii U and NX in 2017 . We spoke to series producer Eiji Aonuma, executive producer Shigeru Miyamoto, and senior product marketing manager Bill Trinen (in separate interviews) to see what else we could learn about Nintendo’s new open world game.

Nintendo Learned Getting Lost is Fun

“After Skyward Sword we really needed to develop a bigger world,” Aonuma told IGN, “but we've actually never done that. A lot of it was trial and error, and we had to feel things out.”

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“We talked a little bit about the idea of density, how dense do we make this big world,” he explained, “as we were developing it, we realized that filling [Hyrule] with things to do and explore is going to be a lot of work. It's going to take a lot of people and a lot of time. But when we actually started doing it and experienced things like moving around on the horse or climbing up to a high place and paragliding down, we realized that our desire to see what's ahead was more than just wanting to see what's in the world. So in that sense, we realized that it's kind of OK if there are pockets of emptiness.”

“During development I noticed this idea of actually getting lost is fun,” Aonuma admitted. In previous Zelda games, the team thought getting lost in a 3D world was a bad thing, so Nintendo typically made environments where there was only one direction to travel, one entrance, and an exit. “Getting lost in those small worlds, it's not a loss of what to do but it's more of a directional loss. I see the exit but I can't figure out how to get there. That can lead to frustration, but when everything in the world is connected, [you end up] challenging something in a way that ‘I think this is going to work’ and then discover that ‘Oh, this isn't going to work.’"

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"It's not actually a painful experience." It's actually fun,” he said. “It's a sense of discovery and, as we're developing this, I thought to myself, ‘Maybe this is what it means to create a big world.’I learned that getting lost is OK.”

Elixirs Impact the Way You Play

Nintendo showed off how mixing different ingredients will create potions and food for Link to consume. And some of these items have specific benefits, like extending Link’s stamina, but there’s a lot of special brews we haven’t seen yet. “So there's definitely different types of medicine,” Aonuma said. “For example, as you saw there's elixirs to make you walk faster, and there's an elixir that will nullify any sound you make. There's all these different effects, there's many different effects that will help you accomplish your goal. There's many great different types of that.”

“If you're going to a cold area,” he said, “if you drink the right type of elixir you can go there half-naked and you'll be fine.”

Rupees, Towns, and the Upgrade System Are Still Secret

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Playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild, we were surprised to learn you typically won’t find rupees out in the open world, so we asked a series of questions about it (and a few other things we didn't see in the E3 demo).

“Rupees do exist,” Aonuma said, “but the reason for their existence is a little different this time around. As you saw it's not about going to cut down grass and collect rupees or find them in treasure chests but it's about collecting things and going to sell them and then using the rupees you get to buy new things. The rupees are there but they serve a different purpose.” (Editor's note: A pair of IGN staff members found a single rupee while looting the rusty remains of a Guardian, but we didn’t find it until after this interview.)

IGN: We didn't see a town during our hands on time either. Could you talk about how towns function and what has changed?

Aonuma: “I can't share too much about villages because the way they work is interconnected to the story and overall world. It would be spoilers, so I wouldn't want to do that now. I think that in adventure games the idea of meeting people and saying farewell to them is an important aspect. So that's definitely in there.”

IGN: In preparation for this interview we started re-playing Majora's Mask. That has to be the best town of any Zelda game.

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Aonuma: “[Termina] is one of the most important aspects of that game. But to say that we took that thing and just plopped it into Breath of the Wild would be incorrect. Of course, I mean, it took about a year to make that town [for Majora's Mask].”

IGN: Does this Zelda also have upgradeable gear? Skyward Sword and several other games have had systems where you can upgrade the tools Link has.

Aonuma: Yes, so the upgrade path is very Zelda-like.

IGN: Can we assume it takes place within towns and leave it at that?

Aonuma: Not quite. [laughter]

This Arrow Is Really Important...

“Yes, you're right that arrow is definitely an important part of the game,” Aonuma said, “and actually getting that arrow is very important to navigating the game. To reveal it now would be a spoiler so I don't want to say too much.”