With the release of Monster Hunter Wilds just over the horizon, director Yuya Tokuda revealed to IGN that the monsters will feature larger health pools and higher flinch thresholds than we’ve seen in Monster Hunter World.
According to Tokuda, this is due to the studio wanting players to frequently use the game’s new Focus Strikes mechanic. It allows players to do massive damage to monsters by exploiting the wounds they accrue throughout a fight. Owing to this mechanic, despite monsters having more health, the duration of hunts won’t be too different from what players are used to from previous titles.
“It’s not as if that was our intention from the start, but health did end up being a little bit higher than World once we thought about maintaining appropriate playtimes and player satisfaction, compared to past titles,” explained Tokuda. “Elements like flinch resistance are also higher, but this doesn’t mean hunts will be tedious. Part of the purpose of Focus Mode is to allow players to feel more accomplished through shorter loops. We tried to design it so that the time they spend hunting is even more concentrated than before.”
Tokuda spoke quite a bit about Focus Strikes, explaining that the studio wanted to ensure each weapon type feels unique with the mechanic. This led to making unique Focus Strike animations for each weapon. He did, however, admit that Focus Strikes may have been a bit too strong from the beta tests back in November.
“For Focus Strikes, we wanted to have animations that show each weapon’s uniqueness,” said Tokuda. “But I admit that this also created a variation between weapons during the open beta test where some were far too strong while feeling the strengths of others was difficult. Though we do allow differences between weapons to give them personality, we don’t want the disparity between weapons to be too extreme, and so we’re tuning them to be more standardized for the official release of the game.”
Earlier this month, Tokuda had also spoken about how Capcom decides which old monster to bring back for its new title, and how much of the roster should consist of new monsters. Ultimately, rather than having some quota, the studio focuses on what would be an ideal experience for the player and how a monster would fit into the world’s ecology.
Tokuda also explained that it designed new monsters by accounting for how it would affect the ecology of the zones it’s designed for. One example is the cover monster Arkveld. He mentioned that the team had to consider things like where it would sit in the hierarchy of monsters that would be predators and prey, among many other things.
Monster Hunter Wilds is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on February 28.
