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I was excited enough for Monster Hunter Wilds last year after Capcom’s first presentation of it that I wrote it “looks like exactly the evolution of Monster Hunter: World I hoped for.” At the time, Capcom had just highlighted how much more attention Wilds was paying to the environment, with a day/night system, weather, and an ecosystem that would evolve and react to how monsters behave in potentially unpredictable ways.
Now that I’ve spent three weeks with the full game, I’m still processing my biggest disappointment with Wilds—that instead of deepening one of the most undercooked but promising elements of 2018’s Monster Hunter: World, Capcom ditched it altogether.
Where, exactly, is the hunting?
To be obnoxiously pedantic, I’d call Wilds and the prior game in the series, Rise, more Monster Fighter than Monster Hunter. This suits most longtime players just fine: I think practically anything that gets in the way of them duking it out with a giant creature as quickly as possible is considered an annoyance. Wilds streamlines this to an almost comical degree, giving you a mount that will automatically run straight to your target while you doomscroll on your phone, unless you deliberately change how it controls or go on foot, which the game actively discourages with terrain only passable by your mount.
For me, Wilds has left behind what should be a key part of any hunt: Finding the monster. This was a big part of playing 2018’s Monster Hunter: World. In most quests you’d have to explore the environment searching for tracks and other telltale signs of a monster before its location would be revealed on your map.
That process encouraged internalizing key details about each environment—where to find key resources and the shortest route between zones—in a way that played straight into the fantasy of being an elite monster hunter.
The tracking process was overly simplistic, which meant it did get tiring to repeat over and over again. But instead of making it more engaging, Capcom has cut it altogether, letting you pull up a map at any time with a list of every single monster in the world, their individual movements updated in real time, and a mount that will take you straight to one with zero input.
I could accept those as sensible design choices in a game that was presented, from the start, as all about the monster killin’ and nothing else. What I find utterly baffling is why Capcom spent so much effort creating all these new, complex and promising environmental systems for Wilds, only to turn around and make them effectively pointless.
The hunter fantasy
What reason do players have to roam the environments, when they’ll get better rewards more quickly by using a menu?
You may have noticed that Monster Hunter is a fantasy videogame from some subtle clues: Greatswords the size of NBA centers, insectoid balloon monsters that look like bursting blood sausages, the way everyone in the hunting guild just… gets along. More to the point though, Monster Hunter takes the kinds of things we’re used to doing in games—fighting the same enemies over and over again for items, building mastery over a skillset—and tries, as thoroughly as possible, to filter them through the fantasy of being a hunter.
Capcom clearly cares a great deal about making the monsters feel like living creatures, “realistic” in that they have a place in a larger world. This manifests in the story, with Wilds focusing on “the relationship between people, nature, and monsters, and what exactly a hunter’s role is in a world like that,” as director Yuya Tokuda told me recently. It also manifests in me brutalizing a giant, flame-belching chicken so I can make a pair of fire-resistant pants out of its skin and a hat with some truly glorious plumage.
A thousand videogames let you craft gear from the random stuff enemies drop, but there’s a natural symbiosis in Monster Hunter between the fantasy of why you’re fighting these things and the basics of the action.
Monster Hunter: World took care to reinforce this fantasy with quests that had you researching and learning about monsters before fighting them. Mechanically, these bits were as simple as finding some monster tracks and listening to an NPC spout lore at you; not particularly fun to play. But they were effective in defining my place in the world and added meaning to the things I did outside of combat, like visiting the hunting guild hub’s cat chef to pick out a meal that would give me stat buffs suited to the coming battle.
It reminded me of how The Witcher 3’s “witcher vision” wasn’t a particularly satisfying mechanic—just hold down a button to highlight some footprints or whatever so Geralt could tell you where to go next—but it worked because it was rooted to his backstory as a mutant super-tracker.
Once you finish Wilds’ story, which effectively serves as a lengthy tutorial, it tosses you into a world with changing seasons and monsters regularly entering and leaving each environment as time passes. You can skip the more rigid mission structure of past games by simply venturing out into the world and fighting whatever’s out there at the time. One of the game’s many confusing multiplayer systems (explained in painstaking detail in our Wilds multiplayer guide) is an “Environment Link” that will synchronize your world with another player so you can hunt the same free-roaming creatures.
The environments are bigger than ever, with spots that you can set up little tents to fast-travel to and use to swap out equipment and cook up a meal. Wilds seems primed to encourage exploration and observation, to make you learn where monsters nest in the fallow season and roam in the season of plenty; where they sleep at night and what endemic life they’re likely hunting during the day.
But none of that matters, because Capcom took every opportunity to undercut these new features:
- Launching missions from a menu is still the default way to go on hunts
- Fast travel and short load times mean there’s little reason to stay out in the field
- Monster locations automatically placed on your map dispel any illusion of having to actually hunt for them…
- …and your mount being able to auto-run to them at all times renders the environments nothing but a background blur
Why do we always know where the monsters are? The hunter’s guild doesn’t have radar towers! And what reason do players have to roam the environments, anyway, when they’ll get better rewards more quickly by using a menu to save any monster on the map as an “investigation” which can also be launched from the same menu, rendering any casual jaunt into the wilderness a waste of time?
A more confident version of this game would’ve stuck to its fantasy guns and only given players the information their fantasy hunters would actively have at their disposal; a notebook filled out over time detailing a monster’s behavior patterns and stomping grounds.
A more confident game would’ve made possible emergent behaviors from a monster’s AI really matter—like a doshaguma unexpectedly following a herd of prey out of its usual hunting zone, surprising you when it pops up somewhere you’ve never seen one before.
A more confident game would’ve taken its interest in the food chain a step further, letting monsters stick around in the world feeding on smaller life forms and naturally growing stronger and stronger, making them tougher targets when you finally take them on.
Monster Hunter Wilds – Official Reveal Trailer – YouTube
Capcom didn’t need to do any of that to make a fun Monster Hunter game. As PC Gamer’s Lincoln Carpenter wrote in his review, the combat is better than ever. It’s just mystifying how much focus it put on ambitious environmental systems, only to then make a game where the environments barely seem to affect the actual act of hunting.
Wilds is seemingly being pulled in two different directions, and I hope the next Monster Hunter either fully commits to making everything you do outside combat feel meaningful, or drops the pretense and just admits it wants you to press the fast travel button and get on with the killing.
More Monster Hunter Wilds on PC Gamer
