Monster Hunter Wilds wants you to tame an ecosystem

The Monster Hunter series has introduced players to an array of daunting biomes over the years. Forthcoming entry Monster Hunter Wilds, however, invites you to inhabit an ecosystem with its own rules and cycles — as well as its own retaliations to your hostile presence.

At a hands-off session presented by Capcom during Summer Game Fest 2024, the developer showcased the planning and execution of a hunt for around 40 minutes. Alongside some promising iterations on mechanics seen in recent entries — mainly drawing from Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise — Wilds has a bigger emphasis on presenting environments that breathe with life, and on reckoning with how your actions affect those environments.

The demo started with a short glimpse at the new central hub. The cat-like Palicoes are at it again, running the stands where you’ll be crafting and upgrading gear, prepping meals and feasting to gain buffs before hunts, and taking on requests. Once you get into an expedition, however, the structure is substantially different.

In older Monster Hunter games, the hub served as the starting point for all missions. You’d often pick a quest to tackle, grab everything you needed, and the objective would automatically take you someplace else for a specific amount of time — rinse and repeat. Later entries, depending on the mission type, toyed with the idea of a more free-roaming approach, allowing you to perform multiple hunts or gather resources in one go within an interconnected area.

Image: Capcom

Wilds leans into this approach to such an absurd degree that the hub almost becomes an afterthought. As the developer guiding the demo explained, you’re free to stick around in a map for as long as you desire or need. Missions begin once you manually start the objective, such as attacking the monster you need to attack. Once you’re done, you get a flashy mission complete screen and you can continue on your way.

Moments after the demonstrator arrived at the Windward Plains biome, a number of notifications appeared on screen that indicated monster appearances and other key details. As time passed, I found their frequency a bit overwhelming. It’s not as bad as a social media feed — and certainly less toxic — but I’m hoping there will be options to filter information in the final game, so you can only get notified of what you need, instead of knowing everything that’s happening in the map while you’re busy trying not to get stomped or set on fire.

Considering just how much is happening, however, the notifications also seem like a necessary evil. A day-and-night cycle, as well as weather conditions, dictate what you’ll encounter within a map at any given time — not just whether or not the Rathalos you need to defeat to craft a new pair of boots is flying around, but also which resources and smaller wildlife you can find.

There are some extreme weather conditions that wildly affect the entire map. The demo took place in a desert-type biome that was quickly overshadowed by a sandstorm. This storm also led to lightning strikes at random, turning a gorgeous landscape into a series of death traps. Wildlife quickly took notice of this, too, with some monsters fleeing toward their nests inside a cavern to protect themselves, and birds flying away from trees.

Image: Capcom

Such conditions might lose the element of surprise after a while. Similarly to notifications, I can see sandstorms becoming annoying if you’re being affected by them every 15 minutes. If the final game nails the pacing, however, the illusion of this living, breathing ecosystem will be much more believable.

Players can also take advantage of the environment and its hazards during hunts. In Monster Hunter Wilds, you can make use of your gadgets to set environmental traps, like luring a creature that’s chasing you to a pile of rocks that will fall on its head from a cave’s ceiling. There are other returning mechanics, such as monsters fighting each other, that seem to interconnect with the protagonism of biomes in neat ways; for example, in the demo, a monster created a sand pit from underneath the sand, which became a trap for other creatures nearby that got dragged into it. I’m also intrigued to see how the herd system, in which a group of creatures of the same type patrol together with an alpha leading the charge, will play into the final game.

It’s hard to judge how the overall experience of Wilds will feel, considering that repetition is a pillar of the series. Some of the new additions seem to be there to surprise the player at first glance, but there’s no knowing just how much they’ll interfere with your subsequent visits. From the bite-sized showcase I saw, however, it’s clear that the new structure of biomes invites you to stay for a good while, especially with the new mounts that make traversal faster.

After the refinements made to the series in recent years, placing the focus on the spaces you wreck havoc in seems like the obvious next step. For all the marvelous detail packed into the biomes, I hope there’s stronger messaging around the environmental impact of taming not just wildlife, but an entire ecosystem, using its resources and rules to your advantage. As much as I enjoyed seeing Palicoes making cheese next to a monster farm or baby versions of creatures sitting in their nests, Monster Hunter has never been about sightseeing. Even if the environments of Wilds pose a challenge on top of the already deadly creatures inhabiting them, the tools at hand to overcome these obstacles are only increasing in number. Once more, it seems that damaging the ecosystem to craft better gear and become more proficient in your hunts is the point of the game.

Monster Hunter Wilds will be released on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X at some point in 2025.