Monster Hunter Wilds, one of the best-looking games shown at the recent Tokyo Game Show is set to be another good improvement in form for what is now known as a never-say-die franchise. Fans are excitedly optimistic about the game’s potential, despite a few technical and performance-related concerns.
After getting a first hands-on with the game, I can assure you that Monster Hunter Wilds is what fans have been looking for. You know the drill if you’ve enjoyed playing Monster Hunter World – and watched my Summer Game Fest impressions previously.
The new entry will introduce a variety of new features, as well as improving upon gameplay mechanics while also, most importantly to many fans, bringing back classic firearms. I got to play a full quest with the Gunlance, as well as another with the newly revivifed Hunting Horn at TGS, and walked away feeling content with their new abilities.
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In the demo, I also took on some pretty easy enemies, so keeping that in mind, I’m wondering how it will feel when going after something more difficult. WorldWilds is every bit as formidable as World when you first see it.
Perhaps the most interesting change is how multiplayer matchmaking has been accomplished. A hunt follows the usual pattern: you take on a specified monster, hopefully defeat it in time, and for your trouble you get rewards that can be used to face more difficult monsters back in the village. After you have defeated a monster, it is up to your entire party on what to do next, whether that means launching right out into the field for another hunt.
Here if a Monster has been damaged enough it makes that Monster your next target as a group. This is designed to work seamlessly throughout playing too with the idea of the game flow never being broken.
Event Systems in Unity vs Server RPCs Here most of us have seen annoying little errors like ← Unity Serialization Assertion → Deserialize Network State can only be called from an active game object (Object name: Null). It’s a new element being added, and there’s something slightly evocative of Iceborne’s Guiding Lands or the hunting aspect.
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There’s also a new mechanic called Focus Mode, which I thought compared to taking a moment to tenderize your food ala Iceborne. Focus Mode, I learned in my hands-on session, lets players hone in on exact parts of a monster’s body.
During the battle, scars and wounds will appear on the monster to indicate weak spots. Striking at these highlighted regions not only inflicts bonus damage but can also trigger chain reactions that cause further harm and can even knock the target down. This consolidation of combat mechanics is way more holistic than the clutch claw approach that had us playing a strange double-handed game of patty-cake in Iceborne.
But for all those fun, there’s an elephant in the room that can’t be ignored – performance. The demo demonstrated some worrying graphical and performance problems. The core graphics of the game are fantastic, but it was really tough for the Nintendo to keep up with itself – it wound up stuck at certain frame rates all over the place outside of menus.
In some cases it peaked at 60 FPS, but during gameplay the frame rate was unstable and the current anti-aliasing algorithm was poor. This was particularly apparent among the console contingent, raising early anxieties regarding the game’s performance across various platforms.
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With the release date set to February 28t, given our approach we will need to carefully manage player expectations over next three and half years. Previous entries, including Monster Hunter World, suffered from performance challenges, particularly on old hardware. Hopefully Capcom has time to solve these issues before the game’s May launch, potentially boosting performance with patches as seen in Dragon’s Dogma 2.
All told, Monster Hunter Wilds stands as one of the most interesting RPGs on the horizon for 2025 and I’m curious to see what the final game has in store. With the launch date drawing closer, fans will be hoping for some solid information and a finished product that does its forebears justice.
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