It’s been six years since Monster Hunter: World showed what the beloved action series could accomplish when moving from Nintendo’s consoles to more powerful hardware. As fun as 2021 Rise of the Monster Hunters was, it was built for the Switch and in many ways departed from the ambition of its PlayStation 4 and Xbox One predecessor. With Wild Monster Hunters, Capcom is completely redoing the monster-slaying multiplayer loop for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S (and PC) with cross-play, and it shows. The game not only looks bigger and better, it also promises to double down on the immersive fantasy of adventure in a monster-filled wilderness and all that entails.
Capcom didn’t let me try Wild Monster Hunters, currently scheduled to arrive in 2025, for myself at Summer Game Fest, but I had the opportunity to see director Yuya Tokuda perform for 30 minutes in a closed-door presentation for press and content creators. We only got a small glimpse at what will likely be another massive game, and it’s impossible to know how the final product will play out several months from now, but what I saw looked impressive and suggested that the Capcom’s Monster Hunter team is focused on the good stuff. Namely: create the world of Wild Monster Hunters feeling as varied, dynamic and alive as possible.
Our demonstration began with Tokuda crossing vast desert fields to a village where he could choose his next hunt and prepare to meet the challenge accordingly. The creature he set out to kill was an Alpha Doshaguma, a fanged bear-like beast living in the Windward Plains with red fur and the weight of a freight train behind it. After double-checking his equipment and picking up some sun-ripened cheeses from a local merchant, the director uses a mini-map filled with icons and representing multiple elevations to head out into the plains in search of his quarry.
A Capcom representative recounting the event said the fields Wild Monster HunterThe s will be twice as large as those in previous games. Mounts are now a mainstay for easier navigation in these sprawling spaces, and the lack of loading times between individual areas makes exploration seamless. Before coming to Doshaguma, Tokuda selects a random location to build a destructible pop-up camp where he can prepare a meal to gain stat boosts. A nearby creature is killed for its meat which is cooked in a pan with the village cheeses into an appetizing dish which the hunter happily consumes.
From there, it’s off to the fight. It is not clear exactly what the normal tracking segment of a Wildlands what the hunt will be like (we weren’t allowed to ask questions), but in our presentation, Tokuda simply followed a waypoint to a group of Doshaguma, then sneaked up on the marked one to start hunting. fight it. Chaos immediately broke out. Smaller beasts were lured into a nearby bramble patch where they became stuck and suffered damage. Tokuda also asked the alpha to follow him into a sand trap before heading to a new area.
After some fighting, the battle entered a second phase, during which a sandstorm began to arrive alongside a thunderstorm filled with lightning. The Doshaguma began fighting a dragon that had wandered into the area, and Tokuda pointed out that it was normally supposed to appear later in the encounter, suggesting that unforeseen collisions between the game’s monsters and changing weather conditions could make repeated hunts more varied. As the storm raged, Tokuda tried to lure the Doshaguma into the nearby lightning while clinging to the overhanging rocks to strike it with his sword. Additional special moves targeted specific wounds that could be dealt for additional damage.
After leading the beast on a chase through a large cavern full of stalagmites that could be brought down with the grappling hook, Tokuda came out the other side into a part of the map where the storm had cleared and the sun was shining brightly. ‘a light blue. sky. In addition to changing the appearance and dangers of the world, the new weather also impacts what players will find in the environment. Once the sandstorm dissipated, healing resources were scattered more abundantly across the map and smaller creatures were more likely to be found wandering underfoot. This is also where Tokuda summoned three AI-controlled NPCs to help him finish the fight.
Tokuda was there to kill a giant Doshaguma, so he followed him to an alcove where he was trying to sleep and placed a pile of powder barrels right next to him. What would be a Wild Monster Hunters Would the demo be without a bit of the series’ famous sleep bombing? The final moments of the fight involved characters spinning on their mounts, shooting at the beast from afar, and also grappling above its head to mount it and attack on its back. It’s the most spectacular Monster Hunter combat has never looked better, and if the finished game plays out this well, fans are in for a great time.
We didn’t get a clear sense of other things that longtime fans will be obsessed with, like what specific monsters will be in the game this time around, how Capcom may have played with how each weapon works, and dozens of other things that may seem small in themselves, but come to overwhelmingly define what a new Monster Hunter the experience feels like it does after dozens, if not hundreds of hours of gameplay. Instead, our demo ended with a much quieter reveal: migrating birds. Tokuda took out his spyglass, looked at a nest in a nearby tree and revealed a few chicks waiting for their mother.
The director seemed particularly pleased with the promise that players will be able to observe birds in Wild Monster Hunters, seeing different people come and go depending on the time and weather, following their own more naturalistic rhythms rather than pre-scripted rules. He said if a player waited long enough, they might even see the mother bird return and start feeding the chicks. This possibility stood in stark contrast to the crocodiles that Tokuda had just slaughtered for getting in his way while he was trying to use his spyglass.
Monster Hunter: World helped the dense series break out when it arrived in 2018. My feeling of Wildlands From the little time I’ve spent with this game, Capcom wants to build on this momentum and make exploration both more natural and more streamlined, with players able to cook, trade equipment and choose their next hunt in the field rather than constantly going back. at a social center. Long known for its boss battle goggles and involved loot tables, what I’ve seen of Wildlands has shown its goal of being quite the immersive open-world experience that fans of other action-RPGs might expect. Maybe even better.