Monster Hunter Wilds adds various new tinctures of wyvern, toad monster and arachnid to the fantasy creature chopper’s vaunted eco-stew, but that additional variety isn’t quite apparent from the weapon types. They’re fancier-looking with tweaked or expanded movesets, but it’s a familiar line-up beneath the extra layers of flesh and metal. I recognise most from my ancient PSP copy of Monster Hunter Freedom 2, released in 2007.
Capcom have thrown in a few novelties such as Monster Hunter 4’s Insect Glaive over the intervening years, but according to Wilds director Yuya Tokuda, the developers currently feel it’s more important to trick out and rebalance the existing wargear than give you entire new ways to play.
“When we start development of games such as World and, recently, Wilds, we always consider whether or not this is the time to add another weapon type,” Tokuda told PCGamesN via translator in a recent interview. “It’s not off the table for any particular reason, it’s just that we never really decided that we wanted to for the recent titles.”
The game’s current arsenal includes 14 categories of large animal evisceration, from the relatively fool-proof Greatsword to the fussier Hunting Horn, aka Magic Murder Trumpet. It’s tricky, Tokuda said, to envisage “a 15th weapon that would actually have a place in that lineup and feel equally as valid as the other weapon types while also not overlapping with them too much.”
“It’s a very difficult thing,” he went on. “With each title we always adjust all the weapon types and maybe bring new concepts to them and their relationships with each other to make them feel fresh. We also bring new depth with new combos and moves. The resources and time that it takes to do that is something that, in every case since the last weapon was added, we’ve always decided were better spent bringing the whole lineup to a better place than to simply start adding another new one in.”
In the case of Wilds, Capcom have also had to wrangle with the problem of what to bring back from Monster Hunter: World’s Iceborne expansion – the last home format Monster Hunter release, which was aimed at more proficient players. “People who were playing a given weapon in Iceborne were assumed to have mastered the basics and it was going beyond that with adding new combos and moves and abilities,” Tokuda told the site.
I haven’t really felt the need for fresh weaponry in Munster Honker of late. I’ve been distracted by all the talk of atrocious pedagogic spiders. But adding to and balancing Monster Hunter’s arsenal sounds more intriguing than doing likewise for, say, Call Of Duty, because of course, every Monster Hunter weapon has to come from a monster.
I wonder if Capcom have considered siloing off their monster design teams, feeding them a lot of fermented berries, and having them challenge the blacksmiths by putting together a menagerie that defies weaponisation. Here’s a rare species of wyvern that consists entirely of balloons! Here’s an insect monster made of nested triangles! Here’s a dinosaur that’s so thin it’s only visible from the side! Let’s see you make another Gunlance out of that.