Monster Hunter Wilds

Monster Hunter Wilds is an action RPG game developed and published by Capcom for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC. It is the seventh mainline installment in the Monster Hunter series after Monster Hunter Rise (2018), and was released on February 28, 2025.

Within three days of release, Wilds sold more than 8 million copies, making it Capcom's fastest-selling game to date. It received generally positive reviews, with praise towards the stronger focus on story and updates to the open world, though the game received some negative opinions regarding technical aspects of the game, especially on Windows.

Gameplay

Similar to its predecessor, Wilds is an action role-playing video game played from a third-person perspective. In Wilds, players take the role of a custom Hunter character who travels to the "Forbidden Lands", an unpopulated landmass filled with monsters, in order to locate a missing expedition party.[1] As with previous games in the series, the player's Hunter tracks and fights monsters, either capturing or slaying them, from which they gain rewards in the form of monster parts and other resources. Along with other resources collected in the game world, the player can then craft new armour, weapons, consumables, and other gear which allow them to fight more difficult monsters.

The game world features several biomes, each of which is a large open world for players to freely explore. In Wilds, players can seamlessly move between the larger world and their hunter village where they can cook food, replenish their supplies, and craft new gear. Quests can also be started whenever players locate their targets in the wilds. The game introduces a type of mount named Seikret which aids player exploration and directs them towards their current objective, and can also be ridden while in combat. The Seikret allows the player character to carry two distinct weapons while hunting monsters, though armour can only be changed in the village.

All 14 types of weapons from World return in Wilds, though new moves and actions were introduced. The Slinger also returns in Wilds with new features added, allowing players to grab items from afar and trigger environmental hazards. The game features a Focus mode enabling players to launch targeted attacks against specific body parts of a monster. Wounds on a monster can be further exploited to deal extra damage.[8] Monsters in the game will interact with each other, with predators hunting prey and certain monsters exhibiting herd behaviors to better protect themselves. Weather and time of day also affect the behaviours of monsters, some of which appearing only when the weather condition favours them.

The game supports four-player cooperative multiplayer, though players who prefer to play solo can enlist the help of three computer-controlled hunters to aid them. As with World, a player can launch an SOS flare to bring either these live or computer-controlled allies to aid in the middle of a hunt.

Development

Monster Hunter Wilds is currently being developed by Capcom, using their internal RE Engine. Following the large influx of players from Monster Hunter World, the developers spent more time on research and development to determine what features they wanted to include to meet the wider range of players anticipated for Wilds, according to art director Kaname Fujioka. By 2024, the game had been in development for at least five to six years.

The team strove to create a realistic ecosystem and simulate a natural environment in the game. According to Yuya Tokuda, the game's director, players can observe the life forms in the game as they live out their life cycles, and watch how monsters interact with each other. Monsters do not stay in a single location on the map and will instead move around freely. Predators follow prey, and the state of the world is persistent. Players can use the changing environment to their advantage, but the effects of their actions cannot be undone even if they quit the game or return to the settlement. The team also decided to move away from the "excursion" model of previous games and introduce a larger, more seamless world to encourage players to interact with the game's various gameplay systems. To further increase immersion, the player-controlled character, as well as their feline companions (known as the Palico) are fully voiced. The team listened to feedback from players of World and Rise, and decided to make exploration more accessible for players through the introduction of mounts that automatically guide players to their target.

Downloadable content is planned for the title, though according to Tsujimoto, these will remain as only cosmetic items such as layered armor gear, and will not be "pay-to-win items".

The open beta for the game, which began on October 26, 2024, attracted over 460,000 concurrent players on Steam, highlighting significant player interest despite some reported technical issues.

Release

Monster Hunter Wilds was announced in December 2023 at The Game Awards. The game was released for Windows PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S and Series X on February 28, 2025, and will be the first game in the series to see simultaneous release on all launch platforms. The game was made available for public demonstration at the 2024 Gamescom show, where it won four show awards selected by attendees, including Most Epic, Most Entertaining, Best PlayStation Game, and Best Trailer. The game was nominated for Most Anticipated Game at the Game Awards in November 2024.

Reception

Sales

Monster Hunter Wilds had sold over eight million units in the three days since the game's launch according to Capcom, making it the fastest selling game in Capcom's history. Capcom claimed that the success was due to advertising the game to a broad worldwide audience and holding online beta tests prior to the launch of the game. By the end of March 2025, it had reached ten million sales.

In Japan, Wilds set the record for the largest physical sales launch of any PlayStation 5 title, selling 1.5 million copies in its first week. This was in spite of physical sales representing a lower percentage of sales compared to previous Monster Hunter titles, attributed to the rise in digital versions since the release of its predecessors. On the day of release, over 1.3 million concurrent users had played Wilds on Steam, the highest concurrent Steam player count for any Capcom game, and the sixth-highest for any game on Steam to date. The following day, the game reached over 1.38 million concurrent players on Steam, which established it as the fifth highest game by this metric.

External links

• Wikipedia article
• Monster Hunter wikia article