Monster Hunter Wilds’ Open World Areas Were Due to Wanting “Seamless Stages” for Players, per Capcom

gamingbolt.com:

While Monster Hunter Wilds will have a more open structure than its predecessors, the developers at Capcom apparently didn’t think about the upcoming title as an open-world game. In an interview with IGN, series producer Ryojo Tsujimoto revealed that the open structure of Monster Hunter Wilds ended up as a result of the studio wanting to make the game it wanted, and not consciously trying to make an open world game.

“It’s not as if the words ‘open world’ came out of any of our mouths during development, either,” said Tsujimoto. “We wanted players to be able to experience a seamless Monster Hunter, and this is the form we ended up with as we implemented what we wanted.”

Art director Kaname Fujioka also uses phrases like “a seamless Monster Hunter experience” when describing Monster Hunter Wilds. Fujioka also used phrases like “seamless map” and “seamless stages” to describe World. For contrast, older Monster Hunter titles up to Generations Ultimate had more segmented maps, where players would face loading screens when transitioning between the different zones in a map.

“Creating large spaces wasn’t the goal from the time we made World,” said director Yuya Tokuda. “It’s more accurate to say that they became that large as well as seamlessly connected during the process of properly depicting Monster Hunter‘s world. More than its size, one of the things that makes Monster Hunter unique is its density of detail.”

“We focused on adding enough density to our stages that just by walking through them, you’ll make discoveries, notice interactable elements, and find so much in general, from targets of action to visual aspects. I think that level of detail is a part of depicting the world of Monster Hunter and its ecosystems.”

Fujioka and Tokuda also spoke about the game’s more open design leading to players experiencing their hunts in a more dramatic way. The fact that the game will allow players to seamlessly start and end hunts without returning to the base camp also means