Monster Hunter’s Next Gen Future Will Depend On Hardware’s Direction, Says Director

The major DLC expansion to Monster Hunter World, Iceborne, is right around the corner. The expansion promises a variety of new monsters to hunt. Also right around the corner are next gen consoles. Though World hasn’t been talked about for those systems yet, the game’s Director is thinking about next gen in some broad terms.

In speaking with Eurogamer, Kaname Fujioka talked about the future of the now mammoth Monster Hunter franchise. When asked about what next gen holds for the franchise, he said it would have to be about more than pretty graphics. He says that with so much change on the horizon, especially with how platform “agnostic” gaming is becoming, we can no longer make base assumptions about how games will be played, meaning there’s a lot of things that may have to change in how developers think about their games.

“I would say the way things are looking like they’re going at the moment, we’re increasingly getting into a hardware or platform-agnostic industry, and the game experience is probably going to be available wherever you want it to be in future, so if that was the case and that’s where things are going next-gen, we’d have to think about how to make the gameplay work independent of our assumption that we’re even going to be sitting down to play.”

Whatever the future brings for the franchise, for now Monster Hunter World is the biggest title Capcom has ever had, and its expansion releases September 6th for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.