Summer Game Fest Preview: Monster Hunter Wilds

I was able to preview Monster Hunter Wilds at Summer Game Fest and what I saw was out of this world exciting for what’s to come from the franchise. A faster, bigger, more expensive game that feels the most fluid that it’s ever felt. 

The first major thing to understand about Monster Hunter Wilds is that the maps have been expanded. They have removed the idea of hub towns and replaced them with in-map villages you can visit, so in the middle of a hunt you can stop into a village to upgrade gear before returning to the hunt. Since it’s a single free flowing map, that also removes load times and the constant stop and start of hunts. 

Hunts begin pretty organically actually. You will be assigned multiple quests, and then they will automatically activate as you enter combat, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of fighting the right monsters. As per usual, fighting the monsters is the main event, but now they are epic journeys. Monsters will cross the maps in packs, and will encounter other monsters organically, leading to massive blow out fights that are without your intervention. You can also egg monsters on into fighting which makes for a lot of fun strategies. 

While fighting you now have a lizard mount, which can be mounted and dismounted very quickly, and they can house a SECOND weapon. This is a massive change in the series considering you usually have to focus on one weapon pretty religiously, but now you can expand and be more versatile. You can even attack while on the back of your mount as they parkour around the environments. So you will be mounting, dismounting, swapping weapons, traversing environments, attacking packs of monsters while avoiding others, but on a bigger scale than ever. 

I say scale because there are now massive environmental changes and shifts that can occur. Day, night and seasons will change causing new monsters to appear during these shifts, but also giant storms will just naturally occur leading to full out set piece battles that are a sight to behold. In the preview, we saw a massive sand storm, darkening the entire area. Then as the combat continued, lightning strikes started occurring, hitting both monster and player alike. There was a lot on screen to take into account as other monsters started attacking during the storm, but it was so dynamic because the player could easily escape the storm to bright sunny skies seamlessly. 

There’s so much more still to dig into with this preview, an intense wounding system for focusing monsters down, deployable base camps and villages, but man, this is my number one game from Summer Game Fest. Period.