Team Omega Force’s devs spoke at some length about the game design of their upcoming hunting game Wild Hearts.
While Team Omega doesn’t name their competition very often, it is very obvious that Wild Hearts is intended to be the studio’s take on Capcom’s Monster Hunter series. While Monster Hunter would find great success on Nintendo platforms, and later fully realize itself in the multi-platform Monster Hunter World, the genre doesn’t have much other games like it. While some gamers compared Monster Hunter to From Software’s signature Soulsborne games, the only real similarity they have is the difficulty. The truth is, because Monster Hunter hasn’t inspired many copycats, it’s still a fresh genre and ripe for experimentation.
Team Omega are a different studio philosophy wise than their colleagues in Team Ninja. But they did not hesitate to raise the difficulty for Wild Hearts. In fact, their own co-director, Takuto Edagawa, spoke candidly about how he had such a hard time fighting the Kemono himself. As translated by IGN, these are his words on the matter:
“I have quite a lot of difficulties. When we look at [the toughest Kemono in the game], those ones I die [against]. If I’m not properly prepared, I’ll go in and I’ll be killed.”
On the other hand, his co-director Kotaro Hirata candidly says “I’m totally awesome at [Wild Hearts], actually.”
Both Edagawa and Hirata came up with the Karakuri system after realizing for themselves that they made the Kemono too hard. Rather than scale the difficulty back, they came up with the idea of these power tools, that can be crafted into each other, and do various things for the player, such get them to jump certain heights to match up to a Kemono.
Again, this is how Hirata puts it:
“Before [the Karakuri system] came along, the Kemono were way too strong for the players. “They were just massive creatures with too much power. But then the Karakuri idea came in, and then we realized, ‘the Karakuri system might be too strong now!’… We wanted to make sure the Kemono were really strong and really difficult to beat, because we wanted the players to feel the sense that it was a challenging endeavor. But trying to find that right balance between the actual strength of the Kemono versus the strength of the players was the hardest balance to figure out.”
So the big gameplay innovation Wild Hearts is bringing to the hunting genre are these craftable weapons. The Karakuri will require that players be creative and do some problem solving, maybe some experimentation, instead of just relying on their motor skills. Is this experiment going to work and bring a new game experience worth playing? We’re about to find out.
Wild Hearts will be releasing on February 17, 2023, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. If you have Game Pass Ultimate, you also get a free ten hour trial via Game Pass.
