When a gaming franchise runs for two whole decades, change is inevitable. What’s released in year twenty is going to be drastically different from year one. Attitudes change, technology evolves, the audience cycles out. Vaunted series like Assassin’s Creed, Tomb Raider, and God of War feel markedly different now than they did at inception. In most cases they do this to survive, to stay fresh, and keep new generations interested. And yet Monster Hunter Wilds proves that its franchise is one of the rare exceptions to the rule.
Go right back to the first Monster Hunter and you’ll be surprised at how familiar it still feels. Sure, it had less stuff, and was almost bloody-mindedly elitest, and that didn’t really change until Monster Hunter World in 2018. Yet after over a dozen games and spin-offs, Monster Hunter Wilds retains everything that made the franchise popular in the first place, but with almost all the sharp edges fully sanded down. It’s an endless showcase of how to improve the quality of life in a long-running series, and, while it sacrifices some of the challenge it’s famous for, the result is the most accessible and dynamic game the franchise has ever had.
Partly, the sense of familiarity is down to a simple “if it ain’t broke” ethos that Capcom adheres to fiercely. For example, the story is almost the same as World and Rise, pretty much beat for beat. You arrive in a new world (in this case, the Forbidden Lands) with a fleet of hunters, handlers, merchants, and labourers, where you find the local megafauna all riled up by some form of unnatural energy, and need to sort it all out by “researching” everything you can stick a sword in. There’s a little more to Wilds, with an interesting dynamic between Nata, a stray child you rescue in the opening and the Arkveld, Wilds’ flagship monster. It’s hampered a little by Nata being an incredibly whiny character for a lot of the story, and it’s not helped by Wilds’ fairly brisk pace, which interrupts literally every character-defining moment for another scrap. Instead, the hunters are given more time to shine, with your character granted dialogue options and a great deal of agency in the narrative. It feels good, too, feeding into the power fantasy that you’re a seasoned badass who’s been doing this for years.
Ironically, this might also be the game’s only real failing: it feels a little too easy at times. Now granted it’s difficult to design a game that can be challenging to 20-year veterans and still accessible to newcomers (even Elden Ring struggled with that balance), and if you’ve put several thousand hours into the series like I have, winning a lot of these fights will be down to muscle memory – but there will be some players who walk through Wilds with nary a cart. New players who don’t know how certain monsters move or the best way to counter some of the status ailments may struggle though. And to be fair, Divine Blessing put in some serious work for me this time round.
Of course, you could argue that this is in service to what Monster Hunter has evolved into. It no longer feels like a straight boss rush, although that’s very much what it is; now the world is open to you, delivering new areas ripe for exploration at an unprecedented pace. It’s as much about exploring the world and its secrets, interacting with the NPCs and helping them out with side quests, as it is about straight-up killing monsters. Dynamic weather effects, a more impactful dawn-day, evening-night cycle, and a population system that determines whether game and resources are fallow or plentiful, combine to create a wonderful sense of variety to each location.
You can wander out of the camp at any time to see monsters roaming freely, sometimes in packs, and they’ll fight one another and feed on the varied and plentiful wildlife without you needing to be there to observe it. Endemic life and small monsters are everywhere in droves, and particularly on the plains and in the forest the world feels almost eerily alive. It’s a beautiful ecosystem throughout, and means going out foraging or looking for resources feels like Monster Hunter World’s Guiding Lands endgame section, which is arguably the best the endgame has ever been until now.
The first 15 to 20 hours will carry you through the bulk of the story and into the High Rank portion of the game, which anyone will tell you is where any Monster Hunter game actually starts. Here you’ll unlock huge quality of life boons, such as an NPC who consolidates all your resource-gathering methods into a one-stop shop, and the ability to rest in your tent to change the time of day and weather conditions. But Wilds is all about quality of life from minute one. Fast travel is easy to unlock and use, and pop-up camps take the place of World and Rise’s permanent locations, which can be Safe, Insecure or Dangerous and can be occasionally destroyed by monsters. There are more of them, though, which is handy even if getting anywhere is pretty fast thanks to your Seikret.
Your new mount (which you can rename and customise of course) is super fast and more useful in a lot of ways than the Palamutes of Rise. While it’s not as cute and won’t fight beside you, your big lizard-chicken has larger saddle bags, meaning you can collect way more resources on expeditions and carry an additional weapon at all times. Sure you need to mount the Seikret to switch, but it’s still super useful. You could carry two different archetypes if you’re trying out weapons to see what sticks, or two of the same with different elements or properties for dual-monster hunts.
Weapon-switching is facilitated by tweaks to the fan-favourite skill system that sees you augmenting your equipment skills by equipping other on your gear. Skills now come in two forms, weapon and armour, with general skills like Evasion and Maximum Might in armour slots and more combat-focused skills like Handicraft, Critical Eye and Weakness Exploit assigned to weapons. It means you won’t have to worry about switching from Longsword to Bow mid-hunt and still having your Mighty Bow skill equipped somewhere because it will be on the actual bow itself. Between this, new specialist weapons that require rare materials from tougher endgame bosses, and of course the extensive weapon and armour trees, the grind is still very much alive in Monster Hunter Wilds.
As ever, pre-hunt prep is crucial, but gone are the days when you’d need to eat before every hunt and leaving a quest early would waste the effects. Now everything persists. Meal effects last for up to an hour, and will remain active after leaving a quest or even if you log out completely. The same applies to potion effects like Armorskin and Demondrug. As I said, Wilds is all about quality of life. It feels designed to get you into the world and the action faster every time you log in. In High Rank you’ll unlock layered armour simply by crafting an armour piece; no more faffing with additional materials for cosmetics. Fashion-forward hunters will have a ball, especially as the male/female armour sets are now available to craft and wear by anyone, regardless of gender.
Each of the fourteen returning weapons feels just different enough to need a little brain rewiring, but for the most part all the weapons I tried (I’ve still never used either lance) felt better. I struggled a bit to find a rhythm with the Insect Glaive even after Capcom walked back previous changes and made it feel more like Rise. But the Switch Axe and Charge Blade feel more user friendly and have a few additional moves, as does Longsword, Dual Blades and the Hammer. But perhaps the biggest change I noticed was to the Bow, which now feels incredibly fast and satisfying. All weapons benefit massively from the new Focus Attack system, making each fight feel more tactical and engaging.
Monster parts can now be wounded, which will cause them to glow red and allow you to focus on them before attacking, resulting in a powerful combo attack that breaks that part. No more will you see shinies litter the ground and panic about missing them, as breaking a part will drop the gathered resource right into your item box instantly. Likewise carcasses and tails remain where they fell, although they will rot over time and yield less potent rewards.
As for the monsters themselves, I won’t divulge how many there are but the final count is more or less on par with World. Endgame introduces multiple variants of each, though, with different material rewards to keep you grinding. New cephalopod monsters change the dynamic of fights a little, while some of the beasts are downright disturbing in their movements and attacks. There are fewer returning monsters than usual, meaning lots of new faces, and Capcom have laid a super strong foundation on which to build going forward.
Multiplayer has been made that little bit more easy to access, with Squads returning from previous editions but no Gathering Hub to convene in. Instead, you create Link Parties so your friends can jump right into your active hunts, or an Environment Link that allows them to come foraging and hunting rare endemic life or secrets with you.
One thing I’d have liked to see brought over from Rise wholesale is the Companion system. In Wilds if you pop an SOS flare and there are no players (or you’re playing offline by choice) you’ll be joined by the three other Hunters in the story, Olivia, Alessa, and Rosso. But you can’t choose who to take or which weapons they use, and you can’t perform quests to unlock their armour sets. I prefer Rise’s system, but then it’s not like Rise has gone anywhere. Likewise, Mantles are now given at set points in the story as opposed to earned through quests, which is something else purists may consider too easy.
Perhaps the biggest complaint I can level at Monster Hunter Wilds is that it assumes a huge amount of prior knowledge and at times is straight-up bad at explaining its systems. Notifications drop into a feed on the right but are easily missed, and things like weapons are barely tutorialised in-game; you’ll need to find the details in the Player Guide. As a long-time player this is no real issue, but newbies may find it a little obtuse at times.
As with World and Rise before it, Monster Hunter Wilds feels like a true evolution of the series, maintaining everything that gives it it’s identity but tweaking multiple elements to improve and streamline systems that stir felt a little sluggish. Granted it could be tougher in places, but this was never hard on a Dark Souls level in the first place, and the pay off is an incredibly playable and addictive action game with hours and hours of replayability. After twenty years of such regular releases you might expect Monster Hunter to be showing its age, but Capcom continue to deliver the best possible standard for their biggest selling series, and frankly, that’s just wild.
