Guys. Guys. GUYS! I am so excited about Monster Hunter Wilds. I don’t own a console that can play it, and I haven’t enjoyed any PC port of an MH title to date, but I’ve been just bursting to tell y’all what I saw at my hands-off screening of some gameplay at Summer Game Fest. You’ve seen a bit in the latest reveal, so I didn’t have to worry about blabbing about us finally having cross-play, but there is so much more going on with this title than I expected. While everyone will be able to appreciate some of the additions to the game, I think MMO players in particular will be excited.
Now, before you start thinking Wilds is an MMO, know that it’s not. We’re still talking about four-player co-op. What we do get now is an open, dynamic world. Think Monster Hunter World on steroids. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Monster Hunter Rise and admittedly played it more, but mostly because I had a friend with me instead of dealing with randoms. Hunting is fun in general, but when you have something that’s tough and your partners are equally tough, it just makes things more fun. This was a hands-off demo, so I don’t know how tough the battles will be, but we can get to that later.
Lay of the land
That whole open, dynamic world thing? Not a buzzword. Unlike in other MH titles, the town isn’t a separate instanced area. You walk out that gate, and there will be monsters to hunt. Our first location was the Windward Planes, and the town there specializes in cheese. The inhabitants keep some domesticated monsters, including one that can be milked, and that milk can be made into cheese, the town’s specialty.
Don’t feel pressured to stay in town for all your hunting needs! Normally, when you leave for a mission, you have at least one basecamp to return to. With such a large map containing a town (a first for MH titles that have come to the west), it’s not totally surprising to learn that you can now set up a mobile base camp. It’s basically the old base camp and looks a bit similar, but there are a few differences.
While we don’t have complete information on them, what we do know is that you can fast travel back to them, and yet monsters can also destroy them, so be careful where you set up. You can also return to them to switch gear or to one of 14 weapons, though it should be noted that the new mount, the Seikret, also allows you to bring an extra weapon with you. So all that mounted combat stuff you may see in the trailers doesn’t necessarily mean you may want to stick with a ranged weapon; it’s simply an option if you want to do monster hit-and-runs. In fact, you may want to experiment as at least some weapons have new abilities, such as one of the bows creating wounds you can target to deal extra damage.
The Seikret is kind of like Rise’s Palamute on steroids. It’s a mount, it’s automated fast travel, it can help a bit in combat, you can execute actions on it (like sharpen weapons, use your sling, or gather), and yes, it can glide.
While we didn’t see meal creation at the mobile base, you can now make meals in the field. In the past, it was restricted to towns and bases, and cooking in the field was restricted to meat. It may seem like a small change to allow meal creation in the open, but as the maps are so big and monsters are fairly mobile, it means you can find your target and fix a meal on the spot, rather than return to base, sometimes miss out on certain cooking effects, and then run back to the monster while praying it doesn’t move.
Noticeably, the meal creation isn’t a minigame; rather, it’s the usual order method we’ve seen in the past. (We’ve submitted a slew of post-SGF questions to Capcom’s PR, and one of them is about whether or not the meat grilling minigame will make a return. We’ll update when we get answers.)
The map we were shown wasn’t just big but populated, and it’s not the only one. We saw the Windward Planes, a sandy location with lots of monsters traveling in herds. The ghillie suit makes its return, and you can use it to stealthily move to the monster you actually want to attack while hopefully avoiding its friends. Get close enough, and you can use a sneak attack, which isn’t just attacking from the shadows but a specific move available to you under the right conditions.
Being able to selectively move in and choose a specific target is kind of important because the town and its quest boards are no longer the sole quest granters: You can just attack a monster you want, and after a few hits, you automatically receive a hunt quest for it! So all those times another monster invaded your hunt and you just killed it as a bonus now can be a whole extra completed quest.
Monsters aren’t the only thing to watch out for, though. As in MHW, the environment is interactable, and it’s not just for you. The game has dynamic weather. We saw a storm roll in and it changed a lot of the scenery: Herbivores left the location, thunderbugs (which can act as lighting traps) came out, and lighting randomly strikes not just monsters but also you.
On the other hand, when the weather is pleasant, it can attract different wildlife. One neat little addition is that when you’re using binoculars, you can watch non-monster wildlife doing things, like a bird hunting bugs and then feeding its young. It’s a small detail but one that makes Wilds seem very much alive.
You’re probably also wondering about traps, like hitting loose rocks on a cliff’s edge to smash a monster. Yeah, that’s back, but there’s more. As usual, you can use other monsters to help you out, but it’s not just the big boys fighting for turf: Small monsters may join in too, which isn’t uncommon in other games but usually seems to occur when a leader engages. I didn’t notice a leader attacking the Doshaguma that got mobbed in our demo; they were maybe an eighth its size.
Monsters can also set traps. The new Balahara Leviathan is one of them, creating deep sandtraps that can take you or other monsters into caverns below the sands. The Doshaguma in our preview was actually able to get out of it, but for reference, getting out of the trap looked like climbing a small MMO mountain. This was not a simple pit-trap by any stretch of the imagination!
One thing I do want to mention, though, is the area Apex monsters seem aggressive. While it may be normal for the Apex in other games to swoop in, beat on a monsters, and let it run away, the Balahara we saw wasn’t having that. It may be down to the fact that it’s a lighting-based monster and had met the Doshaguma during a lightning storm, but it did not leave the Dosha alone. In fact, our guide went back to the mobile base, changed weapons, and came it to see the Dosha that we had seen flee was still being chased and attacked by the Balahara without any kind of rest period or using an item to instigate the fight. It did stop when it triggered the Dosha’s limp state, though, which is still a thing.
There’s still some traditional Worlds-esque environmental interactions at play here. What looked like glow flies may tip you off to wildlife that may shock or stun monsters or ledges for you to grapple with. Certain trees can be knocked down to tangle up a monster similar to pit traps. Or you can just run into tight spaces where the monster can’t reach you and escape.
If you have trouble during your adventure, though, you can now call NPC hunters with a flare. Three came to the “rescue” in our demo, though they clearly weren’t needed, but it was good to see that option, as I have some meatspace friends who don’t do online play. I also have friends who get super frustrated with people, so I can see this appealing to a wide variety of gamers, but also maybe solving the random disconnect issue where you suddenly find yourself missing someone (or worse, if you’re suddenly by yourself).
When you do defeat a monster, you won’t be walking through it anymore. The bodies are objects, meaning you can climb them and hopefully not deal with the mini-monsters swarming you post-battle. You also won’t get kicked back to town, so you have a little extra time to carve out rewards or even just continue hunting.
Familiar faces
While the game is new, there will be a few familiar faces. We already mentioned how it seems like the glowflies (or something that works very similar to them) are back from World, as is grappling and as revealed in the recent trailer, series staple Palicos. We’ve seen the gunlance and at least one bow, and I do believe I spotted the Switch Axe.
Mounting is back, but not the control-the-monster-and-make-it-fight-for-you kind we saw in Rise. Not yet seen has been climbing, meat roasting, or palamutes, though we’ve asked PR about them. If we hear back, it may be a while, but at least what Capcom did bring us was some meaty information to tide us over until the next reveal, which will hopefully come with a release date beyond 2025.
