Monster Hunter Wilds is brilliant - and it might be the most full-on RPG the series has ever been - hands-on
When we write about Monster Hunter on this website, inevitably the comment comes: “that isn’t an RPG!” And, you know, though the defining lines are fuzzy and honestly who really cares, I totally get where people are coming from. But Capcom has always called these games Action RPGs - it’s just that there has always been a greater emphasis on the Action. With the latest entry, however, Monster Hunter might just be more of an RPG than it has ever been before.
When I sit down to play a generous six-hour preview of the upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds, there’s a curious wrinkle to the setup: there’s no co-operative play available. This isn’t some strategic play by Capcom to show off the single-player chops of the latest entry, I’m told. I and a handful of other media are playing the game a good two and a half months before release, and the truth is getting the preview machines running non-final versions of the game linked up for co-op proved a logistical nightmare - so each hunter had to go it alone. Capcom representatives were apologetic - but this is the sort of thing that ultimately proves to be a happy accident.
You see, playing Monster Hunter Wilds like this really really underlines some of the subtler changes made to the game that make it feel more like a ‘traditional’ RPG. You can feel the influence of something like The Witcher 3 in its structure - and the result is compelling.
Don’t get me wrong. Under the hood, this is the same old Monster Hunter. To dip into cliché, if you played Monster Hunter World, you’ll be right at home in Wilds. Everything about Wilds is a continuation of the brilliant groundwork laid out in World, which in 2018 served as a dramatic audience-expanding soft reboot of sorts; the perfect entry point for newcomers. Millions of newbies dutifully joined the hunt. Now, the parameters remain largely the same - but everything has been ever so slightly stretched to draw full potential from the concepts.
The biggest change on the role-playing front is a simple one: the hunter is no longer a silent protagonist. They’re not exactly chatty, either - but like in Capcom’s other recent big RPG offering, Dragon's Dogma 2, you’ll be able to choose a voice gender and then augment its pitch to make it slightly more unique. From the first cutscene, your Hunter speaks - and though they keep it vague, there’s an immediate sense of deeper engagement with the ongoing narrative. Your character is involved in each scene that progresses the plot, rather than standing to one side and then stepping forward when it’s time to do some killing.
“We took on player feedback from Monster Hunter world, where you’re creating this avatar character, but when it came to the story they were a silent protagonist. They’d just stand around as everyone had discussions - they never even said thank you, or hello, or anything like that,” muses Yuya Tokuda, the director of Monster Hunter World who is back in the director’s chair for Wilds.
With player feedback and their own intuition, the team came to the conclusion that this was something of a barrier to immersion. The decision was made to let the player hunter character speak - but then came the challenge of figuring out exactly how much they should speak. Based on the hands-on, I think they’ve nailed the balance. The Hunter can join a pantheon of user-created leads that threads the needle well - talkative enough to have an active role in the story, with classic moments of heroism in cutscenes - but also enough of a blank slate that we can all insert a little bit of ourselves.
“I don’t think we want to have a completely defined character where it becomes that you’re watching the character of the hunter rather than you being the hunter yourself,” explains Tokuda. “So we pushed it further towards characterization with dialogue that’s voiced to get the hunter to take part in the story, interacting with the other humans more realistically and immersively. But we want to keep the characterization within the same concept as before.”
“Hopefully it means you feel more immersed, but you also still feel like it’s you.”
It does. Like I said, it toes the line well. For my money, everything about Wilds’ new-found RPGness fans out from this decision. When you’re back at camp between hunts, you’ll be able to chat to NPCs who have various optional dialogue options that provide more context to the story and the world. Frequently, between major story objectives, the game actively nudges you to participate in some of those conversations with objective markers. It wants you to get stuck in and get to know people.
It has to be stressed that all of this has been kept optional. If you want to be the non-verbal, stoic hunter that picks up quests off boards and immediately dashes into the wilderness to inflict violence on nature, you can. But equally, there’s a dungeon masterly touch to how Wilds is now structured. Quite often, you’ll pick up an optional side quest off a board and the first objective of the quest, albeit optional, is to go and chat to the person who posted the quest on the board to get more context. Or, like I say, you can ride out into the world to just do the kill, no extra information required.
Less optional but still resolutely unintrusive is the fact that there’s more chatter on story-based missions between a range of characters that are part of your hunting mission. A lot of this is world-building. The first time you encounter one creepy monster in a swamp, the creature has turned the normally-serene waters a crimson blood red. As you approach the monster’s last-known sighting spot, the characters speculate on the cause of the eerie water. This isn’t something that hardcore hunters will want to hear on every hunt - and nor is it something they will. But in the context of that story mission that introduces a new beast for the very first time, it’s lovely.
There’s something about all of this that just seeps into the very structure of the game. Maybe it’s imagined, but as I play for six hours, I feel like the order of the quests, the way in which the threat level escalates, the reveal of new locales, and the unfolding of the storyline… It just feels like a traditional action RPG adventure.
Obviously this structure ebbs and flows. It must, because all of this has to exist in a way that doesn’t interrupt the action and co-op driven core of Monster Hunter. The aim is to create the best ever Monster Hunter - and you can’t do that if you betray what the series is about. What’s impressive is that these two angles are mixed with such great success. You can still summon others for multiplayer shenanigans - while if you’re offline and choose to get help, it’ll be some of the named members of the expedition you get to know back at base who come to your aid.
Best of all, perhaps, is that all of this is something of a happy accident. Monster Hunter Worlds already had an absolutely enormous audience - but if you’re the sort of RPG fan who perhaps was slightly put off by the mission-based, co-op driven setup with minimalist narrative, there’s finally a little more structure to the core story here that could make it a perfectly serviceable solo endeavor - even if that is something that Capcom didn’t explicitly design for.
“The RPG and story elements are part of an overall game design intent that I had… it all comes back to this ecosystem being a believable environment, and then getting the players on board with the world that you’re in,” says Tokuda.
“If that resonates with an RPG-playing audience, that’s fantastic - and I hope they really enjoy the game - but we didn’t implement that as a means to get those players on board, per se.”
I think it is likely to resonate well. Frankly, if you’re already a Monster Hunter fan, you probably don’t need too much convincing. After six hours, I can happily tell you that this is more of what World offered: but better. James has gone into the nitty-gritty before of radical new systems like bad-ass new weather, monster wounds, and new matchmaking systems. It’s all looking pretty damn great.
Monster Hunter always had much to make RPG heads happy, too. There's lots of material farming, upgrading, optimizing of builds and even, in multiplayer, a strong element of party composition. Gameplay changes this time around enhance that, too - being able to carry two weapons (in a sense) is a literal game changer and should lead to some fabulous loadout strategizing. But what was arguably missing from the traditional RPG pantheon is that strong guiding hand for a solo player. That is now present here.
But this, I think, is most exciting: this may appeal to more people than ever before. And if you’re an RPG fan who hasn’t given the series a fair shake, this is going to be your best possible entry point. And who knows? In a year’s time, Rathalos may have sunk its talons into you and you too may be a material-grinding, multiplayer-loving, endgame-camping master hunter. That’s the beauty of Monster Hunter; and with Wilds, it may now have a wider reach than ever.
