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You can't cut your way through legions of the biggest beasties ever put to pixels without some equally impressive weapons. Monster Hunter Wilds understands this by bringing welcome overhauls to all fourteen weapons, with some of the most interesting effects in the series to date – and even the option to now take two on a hunt with you at once to fit different situations. Importantly, no matter which speaks to you, Capcom wants you to always be in with a chance to perform well.
"My philosophy is that there shouldn't be any almighty weapon or skill build that just is the best for any monster. There shouldn't just be one weapon to slay them all," says Monster Hunter Wilds director Yuya Tokuda. The canniest hunters will keep their options open, and pay attention to the next threat they're going to face down. "You're going to have weapons that are more suited for this or that monster [...] I want players to think about that and to really treat the weapons and the skills as a sort of tool set for approaching the best strategy for defeating a monster."
Back to the forge
Intimidated to jump in online? The series' veteran devs have one piece of advice for new players: "Don't rush it".
While some players will have certain tools in their arsenal they gravitate towards, Tokuda doesn't want players to simply end up going through the motions. "If they were able to just pick Weapon X and set their skills up and then that was it for the rest of the game, no matter what came at them – that's not the kind of experience I want them to have," he says. "The gap between weapons isn't so much as 'strongest versus weakest', but more that interactions between weapons and monsters are going to make you think about which one you want to use."
Even so, "I'd like to think that the power gap [...] between the range of weapons has got smaller with this title and that they're all hopefully nearly as viable as each other in general, as a starting point for players," he continues. "But that's something that's out of my hands. The game has to be released, and the fans have to tell me whether we achieved that or not! So I'm confident, but not cocky. I'm going to wait and see how players respond, and we always have room to make adjustments in future."
Monster Hunter Wilds' pre-launch updates have even seen some adjustments made to the weapons already, with the team responding to beta feedback to alter and tweak some of the arsenal. At the same time, Capcom has tried to remain true to its vision. I ask how they weigh up fan response when it comes to bringing weapons back to the blacksmith for a retooling.
Tokuda says that in some cases, balance is part of a bigger picture that players cannot see from the beta alone. "Wait and see," he explains. "All will become clear once you have the elementals of this or the different types or it may not feel like it's very viable right now against the monsters in the beta, but there's more monsters in the game, and you'll see that it has its place to play in the lineup."
But that's not always the case, as with some post-beta adjustments. "Some of the feedback was, even within that limited scope, I could tell that the weapon design wasn't achieving the concept for the weapon that I wanted it to have," says Tokuda. "A good example would be the lance. It just wasn't really resonating with players as [a weapon that means] you can focus on attacking the monster while also having viable opportunities to guard and protect yourself against damage. I wanted the controls and the moves and the combos, so to speak, to let you do that, but it just kind of wasn't really happening with most players I watched playing online – they were finding it too frustrating, or they couldn't pull off the moves that they knew they wanted to at the times they wanted to do it."
The Monster Hunter Wilds team watched hours of content from creators playing, and were even sneaking around the beta themselves to play with fans. Which, Tokuda says, includes the lance chief designer. "I was like, 'Okay, that's kind of crossed that line into: this isn't going to make any more sense in the full game. It needs to be something that I retune and retool,'" says Tokuda. "Any time we get player feedback, that's the distinction I would make on whether we need to really go in and retool it, or whether you need to trust us that it'll all make sense when you get the game in your hands."
Skilling up
Rather than a simple addition for the sake of it, plenty of design intention has gone into allowing hunters to bring a second weapon on a hunt in Monster Hunter Wilds, which can be swapped from your mount. This includes revisiting how skills are applied between weapons and armor, with the weapons themselves now housing their own skills – a change from previous games.
That's to avoid redundancies with setting skills while keeping two weapons in mind, encouraging experimentation. "Guard is a good example, because only specific weapons need a guard skill," says Tokuda. Therefore, having guard boosts on your armor would be ineffective if you switched to a non-guard weapon. "We discussed how to avoid that happening, and moving the attack related skills to the weapon just made a lot of sense. So now you'll be able to focus your weapons on having the skills that improve their functions, while your gear can be more of a general loadout concept of other skills that apply equally."
"I would love it if players broke out of their routine and tried other weapons."
As if in a confessional, I can't help but admit to Tokuda… I'm just a hammer bro main for life. How aware of, and how worried is he, of players not getting out of their comfort zone? He laughs. "As director, I would love it if players broke out of their routine and tried other weapons, because I think that we've really refreshed all 14 this time around," he says, advising players to try to move past their preconceived notion of these weapon types from previous games.
"That said, I know that if you're a hammer main, you're a hammer main. So you don't have to take two different weapons. You could take two hammers with you, and one of them could have different elemental properties or a different attack focus!" says Tokuda. "That feature is there to be used flexibly any way players find it useful, and it hopefully will broaden your strategy, even if you don't necessarily broaden your weapon purview."
I admit, smooth-brained hammer lover that I am, I didn't even consider the possibility of taking two hammers until our chat. It's an appealing one. And yet, maybe this is also finally the opportunity to try to get into bowguns? The temptation is there, and it's one that Capcom have really focused on answering with Monster Hunter Wilds – I feel like now, more than ever, I really have room to play around with how I hunt.
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