How long do you tend to spend creating a character in a video game? The correct answer is three hours. Four hours if it’s a Bethesda game, because creating a character in a Bethesda game is like rewinding the Raiders Of The Lost Ark face-melting scene while shooting at your TV with Homer Simpson’s Make-Up Gun. It takes patience to extract beauty or even just plain inoffensiveness from the Creation Engine’s sticky coils.
Hang on, why am I being mean to Bethesda? I should be directing my snide remarks at Capcom. It turns out the scalliwags want you to pay a small fee to edit your Monster Hunter Wilds character’s voice, face and body structure more than once – so if you’re buying today, you might want to spend a few more hours perfecting that Hunter physique at start-up.
All this comes care of VGC, who’ve spotted a Monster Hunter Wilds – Character Edit Voucher: Three-Voucher Pack on Steam, currently priced at £5.49, €6.99 or $6.99. Each voucher lets you “redo your character creation and debut a new look”. The base game includes access to one of these vouchers for free. There’s a similar DLC voucher pack for your Palico, a catlike helper that accompanies you through the wastes.
In the grand scheme of nickel-and-diming I wouldn’t call this abysmal, because I seldom feel the need to fundamentally redesign my character more than once. My current Monster Hunter Wilds character looks like an ailing prog rock musician, and I’m confident that’s a vibe that’ll carry me to the credits. Besides which, you can still give your Hunter a cosmetic makeover without handing over your lunch money to Capcom: the base game lets you “edit hair, eyebrow color, facial hair, makeup and clothing from the Appearance Menu in tent without using a voucher”.
Still, it’s a bit cheeky. A reminder that somewhere above the artwork you’re enjoying sit a bunch of salivating men in bow ties and tophats, holding comically oversized knives and forks.
Capcom have form for this kind of thing. Dragon’s Dogma 2 came garlanded with 21 pieces of DLC at launch, offering optional paid access to items used for fast travel, self-revival and hiring allies. It’s more thematically appropriate to Monster Hunter, perhaps, in that Monster Hunter is a game about carving things up into sellable commodities and raw materials. Wilds has been on sale for a few hours and already has 40 items of DLC – I’d say they’re flogging every part of the pig except the squeal, but there’s probably a Squeal Voucher in the works.