As Capcom prepares for the February 28 release of Monster Hunter Wilds, director Yuya Tokuda has revealed that one of the main themes will be the relationship between hunters and the world around them. In an interview with PC Gamer, Tokuda said that Wilds was inspired by “the relationship between people, nature, and monsters, and what exactly is a hunter’s role in a world like that.”
“We wanted to illustrate that not just through the gameplay, but a very deep story…,” he continued. “There are many other things we have planned down the line that are aligned to the concept of Monster Hunter Wilds, and we’re confident this game was able to achieve what we wanted to express with it.”
It is worth noting that Monster Hunter has traditionally never placed a big emphasis on its story. Until the release of World and spin-off titles like the Stories series, Monster Hunter has offered up minimal storytelling through quest descriptions. World upped the narrative focus, and Wilds will be taking it even further by featuring more dialogue.
Despite this, however, Tokuda emphasises that players who prefer to ignore the story and get on hunting their favourite monsters can still choose to do so.
“There may be players who prefer to skip all that and just go keep hunting the next monster – that’s possible too,” said Tokuda. “The volume of the text that’s available in the game will not affect the number of monsters available, so we can satisfy everybody.”
Doing so, however, will have players miss out on the characters and stories that Monster Hunter Wilds is trying to build. This includes new characters like Nata and how their perspective shapes the plot.
“We have various people living in that world, like Nata, who had his hometown destroyed by a monster, and Olivia, who wants to correct that,” he continued. “There are many people with different perspectives living all together. And we also wanted to illustrate how the hunter would feel in a world like that. What would they feel? How would they think? Everybody is different, so we decided to add those kinds of elements to Monster Hunter Wilds.”
Tokuda also said that the studio has “many other things planned down the line” that will focus on similar themes and build on top of what we get to see in Wilds.
While Monster Hunter games might come off as being cruel at times, the franchise has always included concepts of ecological preservation and living in harmony with nature through subtext. Several stories in older Monster Hunter games, for example, focused on maintaining the natural equilibrium of the world by defending areas against invasive species. Games like Monster Hunter Stories and its sequel even have hunters outright befriending monsters.
Monster Hunter Wilds is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. In case you’re coming in from the previous major release, Monster Hunter Rise, here are some of the differences you can expect. And if you’re a PC player, you might want to give the PC Benchmark Tool a shot.
