If you’re a longtime Monster Hunter fan and came out of that Sony E3 keynote with a few worries about World, I have just the quote for you, straight from executive director Kaname Fujioka:
“We're not taking things that people in the west hate and fixing them to make western players buy it. People sometimes make that assumption, or they've got that fear, but that's not the case at all.”
Phew.
For those who love it, the appeal of Monster Hunter lies not just in its creature design and stupefyingly complex weaponry, but in how hard it makes you work to see it all. To get reductive for a moment, it’s a distinctly ‘un-western’ approach - today’s action big hitters all tend to smooth out any busywork, in favour of getting you from encounter to encounter at high speed. It makes perfect sense - just not for Monster Hunter.
Strip away its fantasy-caveman style, and it truly is a series about hunting, with all the planning and patience that entails: weapons need to be kept sharp, stat-buffing potions take multiple ingredients to make (often requiring gathering missions of their own), monsters’ movements need to observed and learned to stand a real chance of dispatching them.
Which is why the announcement trailer (above) triggered a few alarms in my head. Distinctly action-focused, showing off the addition of what seemed to be light stealth, a grappling hook item and, weirdly, over-the-shoulder machine gunnery, it just felt a bit wrong, seemingly more focused on immediate gratification than hard-earned satisfaction. I hopefully don’t need to tell you that behind-the-scenes demos of the game reassured me (and many others) that it was the trailer mis-selling the game, rather than a misstep for the game itself - but it still wasn’t totally clear how fundamentally this new entry connected to the core series.
Talking exhaustively (or more likely exhaustingly, if you’re them) to Fujioka and producer Ryozo Tsujimoto, I made absolutely sure to work out whether this is, at its core, a traditional game in the series. My overwhelming feeling afterwards is that World has been designed as an evolution of Monster Hunter, not a watered-down transformation.
The basics remain static. You’ll still work from a central hub, heading to hunting grounds on specific quests (although in this case, drop-in co-op means that the separation of quests into single-player and multiplayer categories no longer applies). The game will include all 14 weapon types we saw in last game, Generations (and no, there aren’t any surprise new ones), their systems and interactions apparently as deep as ever.
Even the game’s biggest change still bears hallmarks of the old style. Its huge, seamless hunting areas may no longer be separated into loading screen-connected zones, but they’re marked as such on the map, denoting different kinds of landscape within the same broad area.
But it’s that change to truly open hunting grounds that brings World’s most interesting facet; changes that haven’t been made to increase accessibility, but because the world itself is having such a tremendous effect on the long-untouched core design of the series.
“The seamless nature of the maps really has a ripple effect on the gameplay,” explains Fujioka. “We have to decide based on that what to fine tune, what to leave alone.”
Changing zones used to offer a moment of respite to chug down a potion - stopping your hunter dead as they did so. Losing that enforced break as a chasing monster loaded into a new area means potions can now be drunk on the move. Similarly, gathering items no longer requires a full animation to complete, because there are so many more to gather (many of which feed into the game’s new Slinger item, which can throw base materials at or around unsuspecting targets).
Combining both of the previous changes, there are also now certain resources that grant an instant effect. No time to pull out a potion and drink it while chasing down a fleeing monster? Hopefully you’ll run past a healing plant that lets you wolf down an HP boost. Want to let out a paralysing fog to stop a rampant enemy? Don’t throw a bomb, just kick that weird frog! The basic rhythm of a hunt is unchanged, but minor details have been to make it flow better in a new kind of setting.
“If you want to ask where we draw the line between 'change this' and 'don't change that',” says Fukioka, “then that's what the difference is: do our new seamless gameplay design and seamless monster interactions necessitate a change, or do they not? It certainly isn't appeasement to get sales to a casual western audience - the new gameplay has to mesh with the new concept or else it would just be a mess.”
Perhaps the only system I would consider truly made accessible for accessibility’s sake is in tracking monsters. Where it used to be a case of finding a target, paintballing it, and then repeatedly paintballing it again once all the original paint just slid off(?), we now have glowing tracks made of gorgeous particle effects that we’re told are insects called scoutflies. These do still seem to require some work to enable - you’ll need to find enough footprints or mucal deposits to set them tracing your way to the monster that made them - but there’s no doubt it’s a more friendly system.
But even World’s most obvious shift from the last game - its lush, home console graphics - is seemingly a byproduct of a more typically Monster Hunter-y goal. When I ask why now was the time to abandon the low powered-hardware that’s served the series so well, Tsujimoto’s answer takes a different tack to the one I’d expected:
“We really wanted to go further than ever before to portray a living, breathing ecosystem, a world that looks like even if you didn't turn up, it would still be getting on with its business without you - the interactions between monsters and creatures, predator-prey, survival of the fittest stuff.
“To do that, it became clear to us that the current generation of home consoles was the place to be, not just visually. It lets us enhance the AI behaviours and use that extra computational power to make the actual interaction between all the monsters, creatures and hunters more believable than ever in terms of feeling alive.”
That ranges from making every area feel like a true food chain in action (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Great Jagras swallow an Aptonoth, twitching and whole) to offering entirely new ways to play. Major monsters are territorial, smaller ones opportunistic. I’ve seen tiny raptor-like monsters go in for a bite of a T-Rex sized Anjanath that’s fallen down, then scarper once it recovered, and an enraged Rathalos pick up a Great Jagras trespassing in its nest and drop it off a cliff.
It begs the question - can a hunter now use other monsters as his weapons? “It's certainly correct to surmise that it will be more important than ever to observe monster behaviour,” says Fujioka, “see how they interact not just with yourself but each other and see if you can get in the middle of that interaction and utilise it to your advantage.”
Monster Hunter has always required knowledge of and intuition about its creatures, weapons and areas to succeed, but World seems to be aiming to integrate that far closer than ever. Ever since I saw it, I’ve been thinking about how to use the new Challenger Mantle - a shiny cloak that taunts any monster that sees it into chasing you - to lure a target to one of the maps’ new interactive points (the closest parallel I can think of, oddly, is Battlefield’s ‘levelution’ mechanics).
You could, say, wash a monster away in the flood from a smashed dam, while a Mantled-up co-op partner lures another monster into the same area, before using their ensuing scrap to take down two targets for the price of one. These might be new mechanics, but they tap directly into my Monster Hunter fan brain - it’s the best distillation of World’s ethos I can think of.
Tsujimoto - either to back up that point, or just to shut me up asking incessantly about if my favourite series is changing too much - has the final word:
“You can trust us. We've been making these games for over a decade. We know action, we know Monster Hunter action, and we want players not just to enjoy the game, not just to buy the game, but we we want Monster Hunter fans to feel like this is a Monster Hunter game through and through when they play it. That it one of our key goals, and we're never going to lose sight of that, so don't worry.”
Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he was so happy after this interview that he just left all his stuff behind in the room after it finished. He thanks the translator for giving it back. Follow him on Twitter.
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