Out in the desert, the skies begin to darken. You’re here to hunt the Doshagama, a kind of scaly lion with a squashed face that roams the dunes in small packs, an intimidating beast. But the incoming storm suggests that something bigger is on the way. Before long a giant silhouette descends from the heavens: the Rey Dau, a horned, gold-fringed dragon that commands the lightning. Are you strong enough to face it? Or is it time to run for the hills?
Monster Hunter is one of Capcom’s most successful game series – though it was not always thus. When I started playing it, in 2006 on the PlayStation Portable, almost nobody else was interested. It was fiddly, demanding, famously difficult, and online play didn’t work well. In Japan, meanwhile, when I moved there in 2008, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing someone playing Monster Hunter on a train or in a cafe. It was 2018’s Monster Hunter: World that truly turned the game into a global hit: technology had finally enabled the kind of expansive natural setting that did its huge, intimidating, eminently believable monsters justice – and frictionless online play was a reality.
“It was a challenge to bring the series to a global level that it hadn’t had up to that point,” reflects Ryōzō Tsujimoto, who worked as a designer on the original Monster Hunter, launched in Japan and North America in 2004, and has led the series since. “There are certain things you have to have in place to be a global level hit that we previously hadn’t been doing … One thing that maybe isn’t as visible to players is that, relative to the old days, we are in much closer communication with our western offices and our staff around the world, so we’re in a much better place than we used to be in terms of hearing player feedback and responses to the games, and having that inform our decisions on how to approach the next title.”
That next game in the series, Monster Hunter Wilds, is due out next year, and its makers are eager to build on the 20m-selling success of Monster Hunter: World. Set in a similarly huge environment, with regions varying fromthe desert to a rainforest whose waters run red, Wilds is rather more chaotic than its predecessors, with extreme weather events and correspondingly extreme threats.
“There is huge range in the environmental aspect of the game,” says Yuya Tokuda, Wilds’ director. “This time, there’s periods of abundance or plenty, where the natural world looks relatively calm and plentiful, and the monsters will be hanging around in the ecosystem, doing their own thing. And then as the extreme weather events shift, the environment gets harsher. The gameplay itself also changes towards high risk, high reward: there’s more going on, there are more environmental effects that can be used to hurt the monsters, or that could cause harm to you.”
“We always want unique monster designs that feel like living, breathing creatures, and not just, you know, a boss you have to defeat,” adds art director Kaname Fujioka. “We want the monster designs to reflect the environment that we find them in, so it feels obvious that they would be there at that time – so this time our monsters are pushing towards extremes as well. Our threatening-looking, vicious monsters are even more so than before. They have a bold silhouette and design, but also feel like they really are a creature. There’s a level of detail we can push towards now with modern hardware, like rippling muscles under flesh – the kind of thing that makes you feel like this thing in front of you is alive.”
The sense of living creatures, and a living environment, is what has always made Monster Hunter stand out in a crowd of action games where you take down big beasts. Monsters aren’t just for hunting: creatures are everywhere in Capcom’s world, some living in harmony with humans, some minding their own business out in the environment, others helping you out on your quests. There’s the Seikret, on whose feathery back you ride. And of course the Palicoes, the charming, plucky cat-companions who are like the comedic squires to your hunter’s knight. They can talk now, giving you a heads-up about what’s coming in a fight.
The other thing that makes this series great, of course, is the feel of the combat, whether with a more straightforward weapon such as a greatsword or a lance, or something eccentric like the Insect Glaive, a kind of spinning pole that can shoot a beetle at huge monsters to steal their essence. (Here, you can carry both a long-range weapon like a bowgun and a close-up weapon at once, which will add some welcome flexibility: before, nobody in my hunting squad ever wanted to be the gunner.)
When hits connect – in either direction – it feels exciting and meaningful. When you are defeated (and you will be), you always know whether it’s your equipment or your skills that aren’t up to scratch. Any new player takes a few hours to get the hang of their chosen weapon and build up confidence, but more experienced players, says Tokuda, will be able to leap into greater challenges earlier on in Wilds – by running into the storm.
“I think that this range of environmental effects gives the player control over what kind of experience they want to have, because as you go out into the world, you’re able to get a heads-up on what conditions to expect,” he says. “If you head into an incoming storm, there’s going to be a lot going on, it gives you lots of options. Or if you just want to target one monster out in the plains, avoid trouble and take it down at your own pace, you can do that too. I think the player is going to be able to set their own level of chaos.”
I couldn’t help but see a reflection of our collective climate anxiety in Wilds’ weather extremes – given that we live in times where part of the world is burning at any given time, and extreme storms happen where they never used to. But Fujioka says this didn’t play particularly on their minds. “It wasn’t really influenced by real world conditions,” he says. “Monster Hunter has always had a history of showing a rich natural ecosystem. It’s obviously compressed and gamified, but we try to express the colourfulness and bountifulness of nature in the game.
“This time, we wanted to expand the range of how that could go, to push it to the opposite ends of the same scale, seeing colourful abundance and unforgiving harshness even within the same area. Our desire was to see how the gameplay possibilities expand through that kind of expression, rather than to reflect reality.”
Like me, Tokuda has been playing Monster Hunter for nearly 20 years. It was his experiences playing the very first game that made him want to be a game developer and join Capcom, he tells me. He felt so inspired by it – and now he draws inspiration from the game’s increasingly intergenerational nature. He hopes to welcome even more players to Wilds’ world of extremes.
“We’ve always had friends recommending the game to each other, but we now have children who’ve seen their parents playing the game and want to try it,” he says. “There are many veterans on the team, but there are also the people who were inspired to even get into the industry by playing this game.
“It was a huge relief and vindication, in a way, to have Monster Hunter: World become such a big hit, because it showed we were in the right direction and taking the right steps to open the game up to more players. And with Monster Hunter Wilds, I want to build on that make the game even more open, so all kinds of players can jump in.”