Seeing as we’re probably not going to get any more information on Monster Hunter Wilds for roughly six months, I’ve been watching the 90 second reveal trailer on repeat all week. Scrubbing back and forth through it frame by frame like it’s the Zapruder Film, looking for any clues about what to expect in the upcoming ไgame🎀. The more I stare at it, the more I convince myself that Wilds will be the first truly open world Monster Hunter. This scares me. In part because I don’t like change. I want Monster Hunter to continue iterating and evolving of course, but open world is a big step into a wholly different genre, one that has had a lot of mixed results over the years.
On one hand that step does feel like a natural evolution for Monster Hunter. I also expected Monster Hunter World was going to be open world when it was first revealed, partly because it looked so different from the (mostly handheld) games that came before, and also because, y’know, world. That wasn’t the case thankfully, because ⛦World is my all-time favorite Monster Hunt🌄er largely because it isn’t open world. But now I’m back to thinking MonHun is going open world again.
There’s a few pieces of evidence I can point to, the first being the mount. Mounts are nothing new in the series, including recent entries. The Iceborne expansion for World allowed you to use small monsters as taxis💛 to quickly get around the map, while Rise gave you a palamute you could ride around from the start. In Wilds, there’s a new flying mount featured in the trailer - sort of a wolf-bird, that can skip across rough terrain, quickly run across open fields, and glide or fly an unspecified distance. A do-everything mount like that gives me the suspicion Wilds will be open world because you’ll need something like that to help you get across a big map with lots of different kinds of obstacles. I can imagine it maturing as the story progresses and earning new abilities that enhance your mobility. Maybe it can only glide at first, but later once you’ve visited some distant locations, it will learn how to fly.
Monster♈ Hunter Wilds Reveale♊d, Coming In 2025
Capcom has revealed Monste♛r Hunter Wilds, the next big Monster Hunter game coming in 2025.
The second thing I’m picking up on is some blending of biomes. Monster Hunter regions are typically very specific: there’s the desert, the forest, the volcano, the swamp, etc. The Wilds trailer takes place entirely in a dry desert biome, but at the very end, there's lush green trees. Not many, so few this could just be an oasis in the desert, but there’s just enough to suggest that this is the part of the map where two biomes blend together, the forest stretching out into the desert.
Finally, I want to point out how big the biome is. When the character lands on the rock at your show that beautiful vista where the title appears, the desert looks like it extends out forever. It’s far bigger, and m♍uch flatter than the Monster Hunter maps we’re used it, and it’s giving me the impression of a big open world with a lots more empty space than we’re used it.
That’s what scares me about an open world Monster Hunter: the lack of intention in level desiꦑgn. One of my favorite things about the series is the way it shapes every map to feel like a living world where specific monsters make their home. I’ve played (and bounced off) enough open world games to know that, for me, less is often more, and I don’t value big maps just because they’re big.
But, even though this is far from confirmed, I’m trying to make peace with the idea of an open world Monster H✱unter. The series does need to keep changing, and there’s a lot that can be done in an open world Monster Hunter that’s never been done before. You could track a monster over miles across multiple play sessions, slowly following its trail as you study its track and better understand its behavior. My biggest criticism of Rise was that it took all of the hunting out of Monster Hunter, but an open world game could bring it back.
I’m also interested in what an open world design could do for the story and characters, which have always been the weakest part of the se𒊎ries. Seeing multiple camps across the world, and ܫeven people that live outside of the camps, would bring more life to the universe.
I want a big Monster Hunter game, but not if it's just trying to break some arbitrary map size record. I want more monsters, but not if I have to ride back and forth across an empty desert to hunt them. I don’t want an open world Monster Hunter game, unless it's good, then I do.
