I must once again apologize to Monster Hunter Wilds director Yuya Tokuda: I haven't used the new-fangled weapon swap feature a single time in well over 100 hours. I have no doubt that several Capcom devs bent over backwards to let players holster and retrieve a totally different weapon mid-hunt using the new Seikret bird mount, even designing an entire armor skill system to support this feature, but I haven't touched it. Not once. This, to me, exemplifies Wilds' uneven experience.
It's somehow been 10 months since my 4.5/5 Monster Hunter Wilds review, which I stand by. Wilds is on my GOTY list for a reason. In that time, the "we're so back" dial has wobbled like a metronome. Here is a brilliant game – one of the finest combat sandboxes I've ever experienced, enlivened by dozens of incredible monster boss fights and embellished with stunning equipment designs – but also one diluted by inconsistencies. Since February, Capcom has struggled to pick a direction for Wilds, stretched by conflicting design goals, buffeted by the winds of player groups seeking different things, and saddled with a PC port that still runs unacceptably poorly after, I'll remind you, 10 months.
As we approach the game's first anniversary, and as the inevitable Master Rank DLC simmers in the background, my naive hope is that Capcom can finally collect, tighten, and knot every loose string. I fear some new ideas have got to die, but some others you'd have to pry from my cold, dead hands. Which is why, beside the usual shotgun blast of new monsters, what I really want from Master Rank is a nice, clean slate for Wilds.
A balancing act
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Wilds is in a weird spot. For example, at launch, the forgiving difficulty curve seemed to say, "Come on in, potential new buyer of our flagship action RPG, the water's fine." This never bothered me, a fan of hard games, because I was looking inward at the weapon combos more so than outward at the threat monsters present. By the time I got comfy with multiple weapons and began to question how quickly everything seemed to die, Capcom had begun adding more and tougher monsters in patches. But those patches have been messy. Between variegated quest tiers (of three to five stars), event quests, Tempered and Arch-Tempered monster variants, and more bespoke super-bosses, Wilds can't decide how challenging hunts should be.
Consequently, I don't feel quite the same sense of progression I did with previous games. Wilds is more back-and-forth, more staccato. Entries like Monster Hunter Rise had a cleaner ladder to them – up you go, each new monster bringing greater challenges but also better gear to propel you to the next handhold. The line on the difficulty graph went up and to the right pretty consistently. In Wilds, that line looks more like a heartbeat monitor.
New quests are all over the place; sometimes I'll destroy monsters in a few minutes on my first attempt, and sometimes they'll put my temples in a vise for an hour. Certain monsters feel perilously, needlessly tanky, while others melt to even a half-meta armor set. There's nothing truly unreasonable in Wilds, but I never get to acclimate, and so it can feel inelegant. It's as though Capcom slotted in vertical slices of the difficulty curve out of order, racing to satisfy diehards but also to avoid scaring off less-hardcore hunters. Both in my head and in the text of the game's world, it obscures the normally obvious understanding of what makes a monster threatening.
Trying to please everyone may well be the root of many of the game's problems. I keep thinking back to something Dragon Age's David Gaider told me this year: in so many words, hardcore games that are good enough, and commit hard enough, can convert people into those diehard fans. Maybe Capcom needs to make us eat our vegetables.
Changes to the new armor system, which divides weapon and armor skills, feel similarly swingy. At launch, we were hard up for skills, but through the marvel of modern armor sets and talismans, we now have High Rank loadouts that would embarrass old G Rank gear or even recent Master Rank gear. Just as I do enjoy having harder monsters to fill out the top end of the curve, I do like having more viable armor sets to choose from. But I look at these extremes and my question is the same: Capcom, you do know there are settings between 1 and 10, right? I just can't shake the feeling Wilds has overcorrected after a less-than-perfect launch. About the only thing it hasn't corrected is the biggest problem of all: a PC port that runs disappointingly on a wide range of tech. (At the time of writing, we're still awaiting planned winter optimizations.)
Old dogs, new tricks
Capcom's PC problems have already been thoroughly quantified, so let me take that frustration and direct it at a different downer: Artian weapons, which I've soured on since launch. At first, the portion of my brain dedicated solely to archiving Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate excitedly latched onto the apparent return of relic weapons. Now I see Artian weapons for what they are: boring craftables that distract from the sacred cycle of turning monster parts into monstrous weapons.
Collecting random and unexciting Artian scrap, praying you can finally forge the specific weapon type you want, and then shoveling actual monster components into the upgrade casino feels terrible. So terrible, in fact, that it reminds me of farming artifacts in Genshin Impact, and that comparison should viscerally terrify a game designer. Monster Hunter is a series with two support beams – combat and crafting – and Artian weapons have been sawing at the latter, obviating many quests and cheapening core motivations. I'm convinced they have got to go; may they share the fate of Rise's Rampage quests and functionally vanish in the DLC. They can stay as transmogs though; some do look cool.
Oppositely, I never want to play another Monster Hunter game that doesn't have Focus Mode, a soft-targeting system introduced in Wilds. The more I play, the more certain I am that this feature should be the new normal, not a one-off gimmick like Wirebugs in Rise. As soon as I cartwheeled a charged greatsword swing a full 270 degrees, salvaging what would have been an embarrassing whiff without Focus Mode, I was sold. For some weapons, Focus Mode is merely comfy; for others, it is an evolutionary leap; across the board, it may be the single best combat upgrade Capcom's given Monster Hunter in several generations.
That's saying something, because Wilds has the best versions of all of my favorite weapons: lance, greatsword, and hammer. Hammer, especially, has transcended time and space since a rework that gave it far greater options and DPS. Greatsword has only become greater, and lance has received almost every upgrade I'd dreamed up. My one complaint is that charge blade, too, feels caught between extremes – savage axe and phial spam – and too sluggish for many of today's monsters.
I so easily think myself into pessimistic spirals about this game, ruminating over this and that design problem and wondering if I reviewed it too highly after all. But as soon as I get a lance or a hammer in my hands again, suddenly all is right with the world. In the moment my weapon cracks skull and scale, convincingly heavy but swung with finesse by my fashionable hunter, this game is unassailable. The combat in Wilds is just that good, and it's so much of the gameplay loop that it can make up for a lot of inelegance elsewhere.
Wilds remains electrifyingly fun to play. I want to play more of it; I still haven't put in as many hours as I thought I would, though I'd chalk that up to an absurd year for games. It's often felt like the best version of Wilds is just around the corner, one more update away. My hope is that the Master Rank expansion can leverage the great ideas that are here, sweep away the debris from a year of compounding patches, and provide a fresh start for that ideal game – something decisive, consistent, and unafraid. A framework as good as the combat. That, and a smooth PC port.
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