Behind Monster Hunter Wilds' Surprising Skill and Weapon Changes
In a recent behind-closed-doors demo, we played a section of Monster Hunter Wilds and asked the developers about changes made to weapons and other systems, the biggest being the separation of Equipment Skills between weapons and armor. Read on for more details.
As I played the demo, I realized major changes have been made to the Skills system, where damage-increasing skills and weapon-specific skills like Attack Up and Focus can only be found on or applied to the weapons themselves – a pretty impactful change.
Watch new gameplay of Monster Hunter Wilds above, including footage of Seikret and camp customization.
This is the new Equipment Skill system. In interviews, the dev team referred to skills for your weapons casually as Weapon Skills. Running with that unofficial terminology, let’s call equipment skills for weapons Weapon Skills, and equipment skills for armor Armor Skills. This means that equipment skills in Wilds are split up into these two categories. Weapon Skills generally include skills that affect actions and damage output, while Armor Skills assist in other ways.
Armor Skills include support skills like Speed Eating and Divine Blessing. This new system also affects slots, and the devs confirmed that weapons can only use decorations with skills categorized as Weapon Skills, while armor can only use decorations with skills categorized as Armor Skills.
This really opens up a lot of new ideas. I asked director Yuya Tokuda about his intentions here, and he replied, “Only armor had [built-in] equipment skills until now, but when a piece of armor had a type of skill only effective when used with a certain weapon type, that meant you would have to choose the corresponding weapon. This led to an unavoidable situation where it was harder for people to use those kinds of armor pieces.” The new system solves that issue.
Monster Hunter Wilds now lets you take two weapons with you on a hunt, which must have been another reason behind the change. Since you can now swap
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