I am so irrationally excited to attack monsters while riding my giant chicken.
Capcom has slowly been trickling little bits of info about Monster Hunter Wilds, the successor to 2018’s Monster Hunter World, and we were lucky enough to see a little bit more of it during Summer Game Fest.
It’s a relatively short snippet, but shows a surprising amount that has already gotten me stupidly excited to dive into the game next year. It starts off with the hunter riding their seikret—the very chocobo-ass looking mounts that have been making a lotta appearances in the trailers lately—before the cutscene seamlessly unfolds into gameplay. There’s a lot of running away from sandworms here, but then the hunter pulls their weapon out while mounted and starts slashing away.
It sounds minor, but that’s something we’ve never seen in a Monster Hunter game before, and it looks incredibly cool in the trailer here. A few moments later we’re swapping things out for the classic bowgun to shoot from afar, all while running around on our wee chicken-bird companion. It looks like we can even dodge and strafe while riding them, which is pretty damn sick if you ask me.
(Image credit: Capcom)
It’s a really neat evolution of the palamute riding we saw introduced in Monster Hunter Rise, which was one of my favourite additions to the series. It feels like there’s a lot more we’ll be able to do while riding now, rather than just using them as a reason to quickly get from A to B. I am totally here for mounted combat as a way to break things up a little, and it looks like weaving through attacks and swapping weapons to tackle enemies from a range of distances will be a whole lotta fun.
As all Monster Hunter games are, I imagine it’ll be especially fun with friends, and the great news is that Wilds will have crossplay. According to the official website, we’ll be able to dive in with fellow hunters across all platforms—so that’s PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S and our own humble PCs. It can be disabled if you’d rather just stick to folk on your own platform, but where’s the fun in that? Unfortunately there’s no cross-progression available, so you won’t be able to carry over anything like save data or DLC purchases if you have the game on multiple platforms.
Wilds is shaping up to look like a whole bunch of fun, and it feels criminal that it’s going to be at least another six month wait before we’ll be able to play it. However, if you happen to be in Germany for Gamescom this August, you’ll be able to play a demo of the game during the event. I’ll be sat here at my desk in England, secretly seething with jealousy while you all do.
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