Add Monster Hunter World to the pile of games that are standing against the exploitation of lockboxes and lootboxes. Multiple Monster Hunter devs told Gamespot this week that the game won’t have them and won’t need them. Granted, part of the reasoning is that the game itself already uses actual random in-game loot as a “core gameplay aspect,” something the Capcom team doesn’t want people to skip via microtransactions, gambling or not.
“I think the games that successfully do loot box systems are designed around them completely from the outside and they’re a core part of the gameplay loot, whereas as our loop, it’s more based on the gameplay action itself, then gathering items, then using that to create better gear, and then using that to go and do more action gameplay,” Game director Kaname Fujioka explained. “We would have to fundamentally rethink our gameplay loop. When you’re including loot boxes you have to make them desirable to players and make them want to have them by introducing them in basic gameplay. And then that leads to further opportunities for purchasing to save time or get cooler items. And with our gameplay, we can’t just put them in there and have it work. We’d have to have a substantial re-think, which is not something we’re particularly planning to do at this time.”
Earlier this week, we reported that Dauntless, a game very much built in the Monster Hunter franchise’s likeness, will also forego this particular flavor of monetization, which has come under heavy scrutiny in the last month.
