Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Nintendo Only Needed One Game to Wow at E3 2016

Nintendo did the unthinkable this year at E3 2016. Having previously canceled their large live press conference a few years ago in favor of a digitally-released pre-made press event, this year they went one step further. Gone was the wide selection of games for the Wii U and the 3DS. Though announced, they didn’t show off anything at all about their next console, codenamed the NX. Instead, Nintendo came to the biggest video game show in North America with one game: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

They did this for one simple reason: because they could. Nintendo could’ve brought the newest Pokemon amongst other upcoming 3DS releases to let press and other industry attendees play, or even just had prototype hardware for the NX on display, and they would’ve gotten great attention for that; but the bold move, complete with an elaborate booth that transported fans to Hyrule, the land of the Zelda games did so much more: it made fans, press, other developers, and anyone else in attendance take notice of their shear confidence in the game.

The confidence, luckily, is not unfounded. In an approximately 35 minute hands-on demo, I explored the newest version of Hyrule, wandering vast, open spaces. This is a Hyrule previously only imagined, but never realized in another Zelda game. With a massive open world, my travels across the fields and mountain peaks took me to an ancient shrine, faced off against a handful of enemies, and explored some ruins. It was remarkable how quickly I found myself just getting lost – not really realizing how much time I had spent in the world. In fact, I probably could’ve played this game for another two hours without really completing any tangible objectives and not gotten bored in any way. The world itself is beautiful, like a painting come to life. It’s also very alive – if you slash at grass, you clip it, if you come to a mountain, you can climb it. Bust open a bee hive for some honey? Well, you better have an escape plan to get away from those bees!

Of course, merely running around an expansive landscape, the likes of which I never could’ve explored in a mere 30 minutes, isn’t how you tell a “Legend,” and we did get into the story a bit, too. Link awakens in a strange chamber, and captions tell us his resurrection is complete, and that Hyrule needs him. It’s an interesting place to start, and certainly sets up a lot of intrigue. After receiving a stone tablet that looks an awful lot like the Wii U gamepad, you can take that tablet to the various Shrines across Hyrule – over 100 of them. Each time you solve the puzzle of the shrine, you’ll unlock items, maps, and more.

So about that map, the one that was impossibly large for me to explore in half an hour? We saw less than one percent of the total map of Hyrule. If you could say I explored half of the section I saw, that would mean I’d need over 100 hours to fully explore Hyrule in Breath of the Wild. That is an absolutely enormous playing field, by far the largest that a Legend of Zelda game has ever presented.

From the small portion of gameplay, it’s clear there is a lot for Zelda fans to be looking forward to in 2017. Note, Nintendo has said this game will be hitting both Wii U and their next console, but they only had the Wii U version on-hand, and that edition had the full, massive open world.

Take a look at a huge gallery of images from the game, concept art, and pictures from the E3 2016 booth below.