Monster Hunter Wilds wants you to tame an ecosystem
The Monster Hunter series has introduced players to an array of daunting biomes over the years. Forthcoming entry Monster Hunter Wilds, however, invites you to inhabit an ecosystem with its own rules and cycles — as well as its own retaliations to your hostile presence.
At a hands-off session presented by Capcom during Summer Game Fest 2024, the developer showcased the planning and execution of a hunt for around 40 minutes. Alongside some promising iterations on mechanics seen in recent entries — mainly drawing from Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise — Wilds has a bigger emphasis on presenting environments that breathe with life, and on reckoning with how your actions affect those environments.
The demo started with a short glimpse at the new central hub. The cat-like Palicoes are at it again, running the stands where you’ll be crafting and upgrading gear, prepping meals and feasting to gain buffs before hunts, and taking on requests. Once you get into an expedition, however, the structure is substantially different.
In older Monster Hunter games, the hub served as the starting point for all missions. You’d often pick a quest to tackle, grab everything you needed, and the objective would automatically take you someplace else for a specific amount of time — rinse and repeat. Later entries, depending on the mission type, toyed with the idea of a more free-roaming approach, allowing you to perform multiple hunts or gather resources in one go within an interconnected area.
Wilds leans into this approach to such an absurd degree that the hub almost becomes an afterthought. As the developer guiding the demo explained, you’re free to stick around in a map for as long as you desire or need. Missions begin once you manually start the objective, such as attacking the monster you need to attack. Once you’re done, you get a flashy mission complete screen and you can continue on your way.
Moments after the demonstrator arrived at the Windward Plains biome, a number of
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