Monster Hunter Wilds is the next big entry in the long-running Monster Hunter franchise, and while it was announced late last year, we just got our first glimpse of gameplay in a new trailer during PlayStation’s most recent State of Play showcase, alongside some new nuggets of info from PlayStation and Capcom themselves via the Wilds official website and a PlayStation Blog post. It’s a decent amount of new info, and it seems enough to determine that Wilds will likely blow 2021’s Monster Hunter Rise right out of the water and obliterate it into near-forgotten obscurity.
As seen in the PlayStation.Blog post detailing new gameplay features, Monster Hunter Wilds will include some of the following innovations:
- Changing environments: As stated by PlayStation.Blog, “… hunters will discover harsh environments contrasted by abundant landscapes teeming with life, and even extreme weather conditions that transform the locale in unexpected ways … environments will change drastically. Monsters and organisms will change and adapt according to changes in the environment, resulting in a world that feels truly alive.”
- A living ecosystem: Supposedly every monster has its own unique behaviors, and you’ll see large-scale herds of monsters both big and small roaming in packs and interacting with one another.
- A new mount providing some quality-of-life features: The raptor-like creature, called a Seikret, will serve as your mount in Wilds, likely replacing the Palamutes introduced in Monster Hunter Rise. Apparently, they can use their sense of smell to take you directly to destinations indicated on your map, and you’ll be able to heal, sharpen your weapon, gather materials, and even switch to a secondary weapon(!) all while riding your bird-thing.
- New actions for the usual weapons: All 14 of the iconic Monster Hunter weapons are set to return, and they’ll each receive some new actions to freshen up gameplay.
- Focus Mode: As PlayStation.Blog puts it, “In Focus Mode, hunters will have more precise control over how they guard, aim, and attack in order to target a monster’s weak points for big damage. Focus Mode makes it easier to adjust your distance to the monster and aim your attacks, making the distinctive Monster Hunter hunting action more accessible to a wider variety of players.” In a series that doesn’t let you lock on to your enemies, this change may greatly alleviate the struggle to properly aim weapons in the right direction.
- New monsters: Of course, Monster Hunter Wilds will introduce some new monsters in the series, which you can see in the recent gameplay trailer. We have the giant lion-like bear-thing, called a Doshaguma, and the amphibious weirdo with the thick tongue, called a Chatacabra. I’m sure we’ll see more soon.
All that info already sounds far more innovative than Monster Hunter Rise ever was!
Rise is technically the follow-up to 2018’s Monster Hunter World, but despite its largely positive critical reception, it never quite reached the same heights as World, with many players sticking to or returning to World well after Rise’s release. A big part of Rise’s pitfalls is undoubtedly due to it being developed for the Nintendo Switch, whose limited capabilities meant Rise’s visual presentation and various game mechanics would never have been able to match World’s despite the three-year gap between the two titles. When placed side by side, you’d never guess that Rise is the more recent of the two titles. Rise is a great game with its own strengths and innovations to the Monster Hunter series. But it doesn’t have the wow-factor that World brought with it.
Now, simply glimpsing at Monster Hunter Wilds, I feel we can confidently say that Wilds absolutely possesses that wow-factor. Not only does it have the visual flair that greatly improves upon World but we can also glean it’s set up to have a far more dynamic game world, featuring changing environments, dense monster populations, large monsters moving in herds, and more seamless gameplay. However Wilds shapes up to be, it definitely seems to already be the World follow-up we’ve always wanted. Now we just need Poogie to return.
Monster Hunter Wilds is set to release sometime in 2025 on PlayStation and PC.