Monster Hunter Wilds: Capcom Explains How Cooking Works in the Seamless World – IGN First

ign.com:

Food has been depicted as an important part of the Monster Hunter series from the start, whether it comes to defeating enemies or depicting its world. In the games up until now, you could order a tasty meal from a Felyne before heading out on a quest, or hunt an herbivorous monster in the field and roast it until it's well-done.

Food remains as important as ever in the newest installment in the series, Monster Hunter Wilds. Hunters can use the Portable BBQ Grill to cook up a meal with their Palico, wherever and whenever out in the fields. Once it's ready, you can scarf down some hot and fresh meat. Seeing this gives the powerful sense that the hunter, which is to say the player controlling that hunter, is really living within the world of the game.

Depicting the act of eating, a central part of life, is more important than anything when giving a sense of reality to the ecosystems of these monsters and the world that they share with hunters. That belief has been also held by the development team ever since the very first Monster Hunter.

Kaname Fujioka, Executive Director and Art Director for Wilds as well as the Director of the first Monster Hunter game, tells IGN: "Ever since the first Monster Hunter, we've put a ton of focus in our designs on what it means to live in its world. Even the monsters drink water, and they hunt prey to eat. Humans also feel hungry if they move around a lot, and they get sleepy if they're tired. We thought that maybe we could make a game that makes you feel like you're living in it if we did a good job of incorporating these elements based on real-life senses."

The concept goes that being able to eat a delicious piece of meat when you're hungry makes you happy. And if that piece of meat is gigantic, you feel all the happier. The element of eating in the series, something so filled with primitive desires, became a part of the gameplay as time went on, buffing a hunter's stats.

"Tokuda likes meat, so meat plays a pretty central role in any