Nintendo has been demo-ing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild pretty much non-stop this E3, but one of the more intriguing gameplay segments happened when series creator Shigeru Miyamoto stopped by. In this demo he talks about how the game was inspired by the original 8-bit Zelda from 1986, and how it has many direct connections to that first game.
While recent Zelda games have been frontloaded with a lot of exposition, Breath of the Wild drops you right into Hyrule with very little backstory, and the first person you meet is an enigmatic old man. In addition, the gameplay is a lot more free-form and emergent, and even contains elements we haven't seen since the NES, like Link's makeshift raft.
With Breath of the Wild it seems like Miyamoto is finally able to achieve the open-ended exploration that inspired him to create the series in the first place. It really feels like several previous Zelda games, notably Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess, built up to Breath of the Wild. It's just unfortunate that other series, like Elder Scrolls and Far Cry, have at least partly achieved this gameplay style before Zelda got there.
