While playing Monster Hunter Wilds at a media preview event in Los Angeles, I noticed the person next to me trying to fish. After a few unsuccessful minutes, a hand appeared over his shoulder and started wiggling the camera around, offering up some fishing pointers.
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Looking back, I realized this hand belonged to Monster Hunter Wilds director Yuya Tokuda, who had popped into the gaming room between interviews and seemed to have a perpetual grin on his face as he watched people play and explore Capcom’s new world. We tried out systems and battled alpha monsters under his and producer Ryozo Tsujimoto’s watchful eyes for several minutes, the pair clearly eager to see what we could uncover during our playthrough. And there was so much to uncover, from trying out multiple weapon loadouts to exploring the massive zones included in the preview section of the event.
“If there’s one thing I really want people to feel within the changing environments, it’s for players to find what they want to do, to decide freely if they want to go hunt, if they want to just go explore, and put that in action,” Tokuda told Dot Esports. “I want players to do what they feel like they want to do, and [for them] to be able to do that.”
Wilds brings player freedom to the forefront. Image via Capcom
It’s a bit of a radical shift for Monster Hunter. At various points in the series, accessing that freedom required players to wrestle with the game’s systems. To go hunt a monster, players would need to activate the associated quest. And to do that, they needed to be in their respective game’s hub area, where they also could interact with other NPCs, craft and refine their weapons and armor, or make meals.
There’s a certain charm to the quirks in those systems that some players might miss in Wilds, but the trade-off seems wholly worth it. This game feels like Monster Hunter unleashed, achieving a level of player freedom and immersion never before seen in the series.
That’s not just my opinion; it’s also what the developers think. Tokuda told Dot he believed this Monster Hunter to be the most immersive game of the series, pointing to things like the herds of monsters joining alpha monsters in fights, a feature he said the Monster Hunter team has wanted to implement for a long time but couldn’t due to technological limitations, as well as a constantly changing environment system and the wide-open feeling of the open camp system. You can simply walk into and out of camp to go explore the world around you, and you can activate a hunt for a monster by finding that monster on your map and selecting it, no matter where you are in the world.
The feeling of freedom this gives the player is real, and it makes the Wilds experience one of those special games where you feel like you are genuinely discovering things by accident, and not just carefully laid secrets from developers.
That freedom also extends to the game’s weapon system, which features the ability to have both a primary and secondary weapon equipped for the first time. This might ruffle the feathers of Monster Hunter purists who just like to main a single weapon, but according to Tsujimoto, the game doesn’t force you to use both weapons if you don’t want to.
Two weapons aren’t always better than one, but they can be more fun. Image via Capcom
“The game allows you to take two weapons, but it’s up to the players whether they want to bring completely different weapons or the same weapon,” Tsujimoto told Dot before admitting that he only equips two hammers for his fights when he’s playing simply because he loves hammers. What the secondary system allows for, Tsujimoto explained, is players experimenting with more weapon types than they previously would have. Players can choose to main one weapon still, but they can also decide they’d like to build their weapon loadout in a way that enables them to switch up their fighting style in the middle of a fight. If a large, slow axe or sword just isn’t enabling you to get hits in on a faster monster, you can always get up on your Seikret mount and switch to a faster weapon—all without needing to go back to camp and change your weapon loadout, starting your hunt over from the beginning.
Tsujimoto also said the game doesn’t want to “force [switching weapons] onto players,” and the developers don’t want players to feel like certain fights require them to switch to a different weapon. The options the secondary weapon offer are there to open up more gameplay variety if the player so chooses.
Personally, I’m not tied to any particular weapon type, but I loved the ability to switch back and forth between weapons depending on what a fight required. I primarily used a charge blade, preferring to get up close and personal with the sword’s large axe mode and dish out big damage to wounds. But at times during some co-op fights where I was functioning as the party’s only tank, I’d need to back off and allow myself time to heal, or simply choose to let my teammates take more focus from the monster when my health supplies ran low. In those instances, dealing damage with the light bowgun allowed me to stay alive and active in the fight, waiting for my opportunity to go back in with the charge blade when we created wounds.
I firmly felt the ability to do what I wanted to do, go where I wanted to go, and see how the world reacted to me while I played. It all added up to an addicting, immersive experience—and one Tokuda and Tsujimoto continually pointed to being the type of game they’ve wanted to make for a long time.
And I didn’t even get to see the changes that led to this immersion, either. Tokuda noted how the seamless world continues to change even when hunter can’t see it, and you don’t need to go back to the base camp to get these changes to appear in your game. They’ll be there waiting for you. “You can stay in the locale and seamlessly hunt after hunt,” he said. The game also gets rid of load interruptions by and large. Wilds isn’t a true open world but a seamless world with large zones that you can go between without ever stopping your play as you ride your Seikret from one zone to the next.
From desert sand to lush rainforest, the world of Monster Hunter Wilds beckons, constantly offering players one more monster to fight, one more zone to explore, and one more story thread to unravel. An entire world feels like it’s at your fingertips, waiting to see what you’ll do next. Above all, Tokuda and Tsujimoto expressed their wishes for players to make this their own Monster Hunter game, one where they can do anything they really want to do.
And if the game I played is any indication, they may have just pulled it off.
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Monster Hunter Wilds developers want to give players the ultimate freedom
