Unofficial word has come up that EA may have already given up on and quietly retired Wild Hearts.
As you can guess, the big news here is the lack of news. Aside from sales and promotions, the last major news we reported on Wild Hearts ourselves was when the developers revealed how to unlock the endgame. This goes back to February of this year.
On the Steam page, the last major update goes back to July of this year. That actually isn’t too bad. As a new property, it was probably unreasonable to expect Team Omega Force to have produced enough content to keep players engaged for a year or so. They were updating the game for six months overall, which is a decent run.
The bigger concern is the lack of communication. Notably, EA hadn’t stated publicly if they considered Wild Hearts a success or not, and subsequently if they were planning to make a sequel, or to work with Omega Force or Koei Tecmo in the future.
As reported by Insider Gaming, word that EA had given up on Wild Hearts came from Discord, and was corroborated by a subreddit moderator.
BeardyShaman wrote this on reddit:
“What you think has happened to the game has unfortunately happened.
In typical EA news, it seems like they did not want to sit on the game and give it the time and expected it to most likely be the next MH. Seems like it didn’t turn into the multi-million dollar big hit they wanted and don’t want to give it the love to grow.
Some of you here who are in the discord will know who i am as a mod, and others will not know who i am wondering probably who my sources are, but yes the obvious is obvious.
Its been a pleasure boys.
hey, MH 6 announcement at TGS next week probably
there is a light at the end of the tunnel”
However successful it was, Wild Hearts was one of the more audacious projects coming out of 2023, and a genuinely unexpected release from EA. It has to be said that it looked like EA wasn’t entirely sure how Monster Hunter, the game that Wild Hearts clearly took inspiration from and was planning to compete with, became successful. To their credit, it looked like they allowed Omega Force to throw in all the ideas that they had, but perhaps that lack of knowledge on EA’s part, was precisely why Wild Hearts is fated to be remembered as an oddity instead of a legitimate contender.
Perhaps it is simply the case that Monster Hunter will occupy a very specific niche on its own in the industry. Or maybe there aren’t any other studios that figured out its appeal yet and know how to duplicate it yet. If this is the end, Wild Hearts was still one of the more interesting games of 2023, and there will definitely be fans who will remember it fondly.
