6 hours with the Monster Hunter Wilds beta suggests this one's for the action perverts

There’s a running joke among video game nerds that every new installment of Monster Hunter—Capcom’s long-running, highly addictive action series about turning dinosaurs into pants by hitting them with a big honkin’ hammer—is “the accessible one.” Monster Hunter has, at its core, so many esoteric systems (different, highly complex weapon types; a large array of character build options; intricacies like managing food, crafting, and other tweaks; whatever the hell those people who play Hunting Horn are doing) that it can often feel completely incomprehensible to new players. The franchise has, since at least 2018’s Monster Hunter World, really tried to smooth out some of that learning curve so people can get on board, and so non-fans frequently get inundated with friends in the cult talking about how “this one makes it easy to get into!”

We suspect Monster Hunter Wilds is not going to be accused of being “the accessible one.”

This, from a pretty fun several hours spent with the open beta of the franchise’s latest installment, which arrives in stores next February. Take it as read that the basic pleasures of Monster Hunter are intact here: You go out into the wilderness, you fight a big monster, the big monster drops parts of itself that you can then turn into pants. (At least, you will in the actual game; the beta didn’t have the crafting turned on.) And some of the franchise’s built-in frustrations are clearly in evidence, too: My friends and I had to spend about 10 minutes digging through menus to figure out how to actually play this multiplayer action game together. (Monster Hunter never uses one menu when it could deploy three.)

But Wilds is also clearly aiming to work as a direct sequel to World (sort of conceptually skipping over 2021’s extremely good, initially Switch-exclusive Monster Hunter Rise, which put a far greater emphasis on over-the-top-excess than more grounded elements), and that means doubling down on that game’s specific interests. On the one hand, that involves a heavier focus on the idea of presenting its environments as big, cohesive ecosystems, which you navigate on the back of dinosaur-chicken mounts with an annoying tendency to be permanently on auto-pilot. (Mounts were originally introduced in World’s DLC Iceborne, and then made a million times more fun to use in Rise, but Wilds is clearly sticking with the older design idea.) This is obviously pretty neat, even if the main environment in the beta has a tendency to be endless-desert drab. You can find cool stuff, like the lightning-blasted dunes where the beta’s biggest, baddest monster hangs out, but a lot of the massive world the game is touting is just vast expanses of sand that would give Anakin Skywalker a conniption.

Wilds‘ more ambitious design ideas, though, show up in its combat, which has put a bigger emphasis on reflexes and shutting down enemy moves than previous installments. Of the three weapons we gave a serious try to during our time with the beta—long sword, dual blades, and our beloved big honkin’ hammer—each of them felt like they’d had their movesets tweaked to put more focus on perfectly timed dodges or interruptions of enemy attacks. Monster Hunter has always been a little weird as an action game, with a pacing to combat that frequently requires big commitments from hunters to land their biggest attacks. (And a damage-to-health ratio that punishes taking those inevitable hits as you slowly chip away at your quarry.) Some of these alterations to the combat are thrilling, most notably a new bit of UI that causes your health bar to flip out like an erratic EKG when a monster prepares to use a move that would flatline you, allowing you to know when you need to bug out or get some breath. Some elements feel like they’re just part of the curve of learning new games, and monsters, figuring out the safe windows you can launch your attacks from. But some of them feel like a deliberate effort to tune the fights in this latest game to appeal to more action-minded players, with skill ceilings apparently getting raised across the board. (Again, this is just first impressions, based on three of the game’s 18 weapon types; it’s possible Gunlance or Insect Glaive have suddenly become easy as pie to wield.) None of this is unwelcome, creating a slightly more fast-paced version of well-refined combat, but it does suggest that Capcom is ready to start dialing things back up for the Action Perverts now that they’ve gotten a new generation of players hooked.

The big thing we’re hoping to see out of Wilds when it finally comes out next year is more life and energy (The ability to start making clothes and new weapons will inevitably help on that score; we normally don’t care much about fashion in games, but Monster Hunter‘s goofy armor designs scratch the itch.) Six years ago, World revolutionized this franchise when it took levels that were made up of individual “rooms” and turned them into cohesive zones for players to explore, and it’s fascinating to see the design team pursue that idea to the furthest ends that modern technology can support. We’re just hoping they don’t forget the franchise’s fun side along the way.