Monster Hunter Wilds is finally here, and we’re as excited about playing it as we are about showing new players the ropes. Monster Hunter games are incredibly mechanically-dense, which is what most players come to them for.
On top of that, they also offer a large set of options that let you tweak how you interact with some of those mechanics, and many of them would solve problems newcomers might think are just how things work in the game.
As you can imagine, a game such as Monster Hunter Wilds from a long-running series has a tonne of legacy options and, well, certain ways of doing things that have been accumulating over the years to create something that – quite rightly – can scare off new players.
Wilds even expands that list with its own flavour of those features, not to mention all the accessibility options that didn’t exist before. Some of the tweaks we’re going to discuss only exist in Wilds, too, as a way for players to customise their experience with some of the new features/mechanics.
It’s worth keeping in mind that some options are only visible when accessing the menu from within the game, not from the main menu. So, without further ado, let’s jump into our recommendations.
Disable other Hunters’ Seikrets
Your bird-dog mount, the Seikret, is quite rightly going to be the thing you rely on the most during, before, and after hunts. It can automatically navigate its way towards any monster you mark – or really anywhere on the map you’d wanna go. It’s also the best way to recover, quickly get out of dodge and buy yourself some time to heal during fights.
It carries your second weapon – new in Monster Hunter Wilds, and it has a pouch that stores some free items the game gives you at the start of each hunt. As you fight the monster, however, Seikrets have a tendency to just, well, kinda be in the way. They don’t know what to do so they hang around to try be close to you, which you don’t always want.
Making it worse, however, are the Seikrets of other Hunters, which also stand around and frankly add to the clutter. But there’s a solution, because the game lets you turn off other Hunters’ unmounted Seikrets. Although the option says the effects are universal, we’ve found that it only affects the AI/Support Hunters you can call upon to aid you, not real players. We’ll take what we can get, though. To toggle that option off/on, go to Options – Game Settings, and go to Page 3. From there, you can toggle the Hide Other Seikret option to On.
Stop your Seikret from wandering
In Monster Hunter Wilds, it sometimes feels like the damn Seikrets just won’t stop moving. Even when you just want to take a moment to open the map, survey an area, or simply admire the view.
To help lessen that, you can prevent them from constantly roaming by going to Page 3 of the Game Settings tab under Options. Find the Seikret Auto-explore option and set it to Off. By doing so, you prevent the mounts from going into auto-explore mode, even where there’s no waypoint set.
Control what happens when you call your Seikret
By default, calling your Seikret mount in Monster Hunter Wilds will automatically make it move. It’s either going to head to the waypoint you previously set, or simply keep moving around aimlessly. If you want better control of the damn thing, you can switch to manual controls.
To do that, go to Options – Controls. On Page 2, find the Call Seikret Controls, and Call Seikret Controls (Radial Menu). Look around both and see which option fits you best, but we recommend setting the second setting to Manual Movement.
There are also two more Seikret options below that you should consider tweaking. The first controls how you want to command the mount, while the second controls how to get the Seikret to exit its current route.
Widen the FOV (camera distance)
One of the best ways to set yourself up for success in Monster Hunter is to always keep the monster you’re fighting in the frame. And one of the best ways of doing that is to have a wider field of view. By setting the camera distance further away from your character than the default option, you may be able to better track the monster you’re fighting.
In Wilds, this can be done in two ways. You can head to the Accessibility section under Options, and find the Motion Sickness Reduction item. This is a collection of settings that includes a few other settings, and you tweak all of them from there, rather than navigate to where each sits in the game’s menu.
Take Camera Distance Zoom all the way to ten – the current maximum. You can also mess with Camera Sway, and Camera Shake from there if you don’t like those settings. If you hate losing control of the camera when it tries to auto-center, you can also turn that off, both for on foot and when mounted.
The same Camera Distance Zoom option can also be found in the Camera tab under Options. On that page, there’s an option to shift the offset position of the camera, too, which can help you position your character directly in the middle of the frame, or biased towards the right/left. Play around with the Camera Distance: Pan option to get a result you like. You’ll be able to see it adjusted in the background in real time, too.
Note that at certain moments during fights, the camera will zoom out on its own to make it easier to see what the monster is doing, but it doesn’t hurt to get better visibility outside of those moments.
Change how targeting monsters interacts with objectives
One of the best new features in Monster Hunter Wilds is the ability to create an objective to hunt a certain monster simply by targeting it on the map and setting a waypoint towards it. The quest will begin a few seconds after you start attacking your target.
By default, placing a pin on a monster’s icon also makes it your objective, but you can change this behaviour to your liking. On Page 3 of the Camera settings under Options, look for Target/Objective Selection. From there, you can select whichever option works for you, but we found the middle option – Only Link When Targeting – to be the one that offers the smoothest experience.
Reduce the number of tutorials
Monster Hunter Wilds can really be overbearing with the number of tutorials it keeps throwing on the screen. A lot of those can be helpful, of course, especially if you’re completely new to the series, but for many players, they can be a bit much.
You won’t be able to turn off all tutorials entirely, but you can reduce the number of them, at least. Simply go to the Options menu, and toggle the Tutorial Amount option under Game Settings. Your options are Display All, and Display Some. The latter is what anyone who knows what they’re doing in Monster Hunter should start with.
Right below that is the Repeat Tutorial option, which you can set to Do Not Repeat to prevent certain tutorials from being triggered anytime the game decides that certain conditions have been met. Once again, this won’t turn all of them off (some tutorials will repeat regardless), but you can reduce the frequency considerably by tweaking those two settings.
Change your Palico’s speech to meows
I think we’re mostly in agreement here that Palicos did not need to have human speech. For the entirety of the Monster Hunter series the feline friends sounded like cats, with other characters understanding and responding to them like Chewbacca. Wilds, however, had the bright idea of making them speak like people.
If you’re not down with that nonsense, you can simply bring back all the cute meows instead. Simply head to the Audio tab in the Options menu, and locate the Felyne Language toggle about midway through the page. Stick it on Felyne Language and go enjoy your hunts.
Mess around with Directional and Expanded Item Bar Controls
One of the better accessibility options Monster Hunter Wilds offers is the ability to control the behaviour of a few of the game’s, well, legacy features. Directional Controls, for instance, control what happens when you tilt the left stick up. Do you want it to move the character in the direction it’s facing, or the direction the camera is facing instead?
The Expanded Item Bar can similarly be tweaked to work in one of several ways, depending on your preference. For instance, you can change how to toggle between Normal and Expanded Item Bars. Both of these settings can be found under the first page of Controls in the Options menu.
Further down the same page, you’ll also find settings that control how quickly you can scroll through the Item Bar (cursor speed) – crucial when fighting fast monsters, as well as an option to dictate whether or not the Expanded Item Bar will display all stacks or only the currently selected.