It’s no secret to anyone who knows gaming history that a certain monster-themed title from Capcom was only a hit in Japan for the longest of times. Sure, it got ported to the West often, but it never had serious success there. Then, with the arrival of Monster Hunter World on PS4, everything changed. The game changed many elements of what it did in the past and tried to adapt things to be more accessible to a general gaming audience. Seamless worlds, better battle mechanics, improvements to the story, etc. Now, Monster Hunter Wilds is coming out soon, and the team knows it needs to recapture the magic of that PS4 title to give players what they want.
In a chat with PC Gamer, executive director Kaname Fujioka noted that the PS4 and Xbox One game did affect the franchise and the dev team in a lot of ways due to how many people it reached:
“It’s true, World has reached quite a lot of people. Seeing people become fans of the game means a lot to us, because through Monster Hunter, we’re able to express the game design and creativity that we value so much. And for people around the world to really understand it has really given us a lot of confidence.”
That confidence would lead to them doing another hit game in the franchise based on the Nintendo Switch, which later got ported to every other console and got updates for quite a long time. Those two games remain the best-selling titles in the franchise. That’s why you should expect to see things from those titles in the upcoming game but with some upgrades:
“As for Wilds, we’re really expanding on the parts that were appreciated in World and taking it even further.”
That makes perfect sense because the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S will have far greater technical capabilities than the last generation of systems. Just as important, now that they have the confidence across back-to-back titles, they know that they can push things in certain directions to try and make the game even better or implement concepts or ideas that they couldn’t fully flesh out before for one reason or another.
By all accounts, Monster Hunter Wilds will indeed have grander areas to explore with your crew, new monsters to fight, and seamless co-op with other players so you can battle monsters together and then drop out when you need to leave.
If all goes well, this could easily be an experience to remember.
