Monster Hunter Wilds casually mentions 100-player lobbies ahead of its first beta, but this is no MMO: 16 players show up at once just like Monster Hunter World

gamesradar.com:

As PS5 players double-check how to access the Monster Hunter Wilds beta ahead of the incoming PlayStation Plus-exclusive early access period, developer Capcom released a handy little breakdown of the features in the beta and in the game itself, and the promise of 100-player lobbies has perked some ears right up. 

"In multiplayer, players join lobbies, which are used to connect them with other players," the Monster Hunter Wilds beta one-pager reads. "Each lobby can hold up to 100 people, and belonging to the same lobby as someone else allows you to interact with them more closely." 

If you've been around since the Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate or Generations Ultimate days of much, much tinier lobbies, this news may rightly send your heart soaring. That said, there are a few important caveats here. Just like Monster Hunter World, Monster Hunter Wilds will only display 16 players at once, just as Monster Hunter World did in Gathering Hub lobbies. Barring raid-style hunts, like World's Kulve Taroth siege event, game parties will be limited to four hunters as usual, and even then it may be more like a bunch of groups of four working together asynchronously. 

"In Monster Hunter Wilds, 16 players are shown at base camps!" the official Monster Hunter Twitter account said earlier this month. "Recently announced at [Tokyo Game Show] by [Monster Hunter Wilds] director Yuya Tokuda, up to 16 of the players in a lobby will be displayed at the same time in each of the various base camps. Meet friends, chat, form hunting groups and more!"

After playing a whole heck of a lot of all the recent Monster Hunter games, I'm picturing 16-player instances in Wilds united under one big lobby. We still need to see this in action, and thankfully the Monster Hunter Wilds beta should give us a good showing, but the massive pool of 100 players seems to work more like a background server list loosely corralling groups of interested hunters and making it easier to find or share hunts you're interested