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I'm gonna let you in on a secret, reader. We didn't publish a whole guide on how to set up Monster Hunter Wilds multiplayer for no reason. This stuff is needlessly complicated and a lot of people are looking up how the heck it works, because after more than 20 years, Capcom still hasn't figured out how multiplayer hunting lobbies are supposed to go. I'll give the company a hint: not like this.
This bird's nest of an online system didn't really come up in the pre-release environment of our Monster Hunter Wilds review. While I stand by the score I gave it – the game, after all, is fun – now that I'm playing with my own friends and negotiating matchmaking hurdles like an obstacle course, my gob is smacked and my gast is flabbered. This is ridiculous.
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Let me lay out the labyrinth of menus before you, not with care and a pragmatic spirit like our aforementioned guide, but with the kind of red-faced hyperbole and frustration that this system deserves and elicits. To play Monster Hunter Wilds with friends, you may want to:
- Make or join a Squad, which is sort of like a guild and secondary friends list smoothie
- Add your friends via Hunter ID for the primary friends list, not to be confused with the friends list you already have on your platform of choice – and don't get that Hunter ID and Squad ID mixed up, either
- Form and join private lobbies from the main menu or at Authorization Master Alma in-game
- Join Link Parties to drop into hunts that anyone in the party posts, obviously via 4-player hunting lobbies which are separate to the other lobbies
- Form Environment Links to explore the same instanced world together
- Answer SOS requests which present an entire planet worth of quest options
- Look out for ghost or redundant joining or invite notifications which may well be locked behind upwards of three different menus
- Prepare to be jump-scared by dozens of random players in spoiler-tastic endgame gear when you inevitably join the wrong lobby
This fractal mess of lobbies and lists is approximately 200% more complicated than it needs to be. It is 2025. What the fuck are we doing here?
I understand that this is depressingly close to the norm for Monster Hunter, which has arguably never had the smoothest multiplayer, but even by those standards Wilds feels like an outlier. It's added a bunch of cool features but optimized them like a 5/8" screw in a 3/8" hole. The most frustrating part is that this is worse than the previous game, Monster Hunter Rise, which condensed multiplayer pretty nicely with a simple passcode lobby system. Add friends, set password, join lobby, bam. A little setup, but it worked. Now it's confusing even after the setup. We can only hope that the April update for Monster Hunter Wilds, which is adding some sort of Gathering Hub-like space, will help.
For now, my best advice is this: make a Squad and use it as a catch-all workaround. Your Squad is your rock. There's no getting around the multi-step multiplayer mayhem, but a Squad will at least give you a consistent starting point when setting up sessions. My crew's experience has only been relatively smooth because I made a Squad (and Discord server) to help coordinate things. I've had to explain this stuff to several different people at this point and even I'm starting to think I sound insane. This is not normal! We are having fun despite this system, not because of it, which is textbook UX breakdown.
On top of that, Wilds repeats the cardinal sin of Monster Hunter World by walling off campaign co-op until everyone in the party reaches certain story beats on their own. You can still progress the story with friends by having everyone start a quest, quit out of their sessions, and then dogpile a host who's playing the same mission – which is exactly what my group has done, with consistent but fiddly success – but that's like saying you can drive a car with square wheels. It makes sense that you can't hunt monsters you haven't naturally encountered yet, but I don't understand why Capcom has pushed so hard on cross-play, a more structured narrative, and near-immediate access to multiplayer – all good things – while refusing to blend them together.
Once you push through the rigamarole and earn a degree in Menu-ology, Monster Hunter Wilds generally plays just fine in multiplayer. My friends and I have been able to hunt together with only one or two disconnects across dozens of hunts on PC. But for a game that's gone out of its way to entreat and onboard new players, and done a pretty good job elsewhere, Wilds spectacularly fumbles the task of explaining and constructing multiplayer. I've never seen another game with such excellent co-op, and that is so focused on co-op, convey co-op so poorly. It's unintuitive, over-designed, and as badly in need of changes as the PC version itself.
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