Monster Hunter Wilds' new gyro controls are a fantastic option for disabled and able-bodied players alike

Wilds is the most accessible Monster Hunter to date, in more ways than one.

Buried under the mountains of confusing and redundant menus, Monster Hunter Wilds is among is far and away one of the most accessible games I’ve played in recent years. Clumsily laying my cards on the table here: I’m diagnosed with Klumpke’s Palsy, which has atrophied my right hand into a limp and imprecise claw-thing that makes rapid or complex inputs extremely difficult. I’ve come to rely on accommodations like gyro aim, macros, and controllers with extra paddles.

While these features can always be crammed into contemporary PC games by way of Steam Input, strong native support for customizable control options prevents weird conflicts arising and typically allows for a streamlined play experience.

After a few hours of clearing out the early ranks and testing out different configurations, I settled on a high sensitivity, hybrid gyro-based setup that let me quickly flick my wrists to aim my blades and bowguns (that even let me play one-handed when my hand tires). These options have made all the difference for me as I’ve started taking on more challenging hunts.

Difficulty

Much has been made of Wilds’ difficulty in comparison to other Monster Hunter games—this is definitely the easiest that the series has ever been, significantly more so than even Rise.

While the “real” game starts after the credits roll and you begin to settle into that familiar hunt-craft-hunt grind, the lack of difficulty on a first run-through pairs up well with a surprisingly enjoyable campaign that places much more emphasis on its narrative. While veteran hunters may feel like they’re being forced to keep the training wheels on for too long, new hunters aren’t going to run into any roadblocks seeing the story through to its finish.

While Wilds doesn’t have difficulty settings, there are a few options entombed within the game settings menu that can make things harder or easier, governing the behavior of AI support hunters and just how many of Wild’s over-tuned combat mechanics they can indulge in (they’re all enabled by default).

Monster Hunter Wilds support hunter options — You can enable or disable the AI hunters’ abilities to make them stronger or weaker. (Image credit: Capcom)

Inputs

While there’s unfortunately no option to remap controllers inputs (you’re limited to cycling through four different presets) within Monster Hunter Wilds without going through Steam Input, there are rebindable keys for keyboard & mouse players, offering primary and secondary bindings for every command. While the lack of controller rebinding is a shame, Wilds provides enough flexibility that I’ve been able to claw my way up to High Rank one-handed. I’m particularly ecstatic about the options for gyro controls.

Monster Hunter Wilds' in-depth gyro control options — The gyro control options, once configured, offer a lot of flexibility, and even me play Wilds one-handed. (Image credit: Capcom)

While I found the gyro camera to be more trouble than it was worth, aiming the bows and bowguns with gyro both feels wonderfully smooth and empowers me with a precision I would otherwise not have access to. Even controlling the focus mode via gyro (used to target and strike wounds) feels far more natural than using just the right stick for aiming.

While gyro is obviously a massive boon to people like me with limited fine motor skills, I’m fully convinced now this is the ideal way to play, period. There’s also a full-on, Dark Souls-esque target lock-on available, which when combined with gyro camera controls means it’s actually possible to play one-handed, assuming you’re comfortable with using a USB foot controller for attacking.

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Game Settings

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Monster Hunter Wilds accessibility options — There are options for Seikret auto-pathing and rebinding keyboard inputs…
(Image credit: Capcom)

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Monster Hunter Wilds features intricate HUD scaling options, allowing for each HUD element to be scaled up or down as needed. There are three text sizes you can select for every piece of written text in the game, legible across both a desk-bound PC and a living room TV setup.

The Seikret, your weird dog-bird thing, has a slew of customizable behaviors entombed three pages deep in the game settings menu. We’ve already touched on how to disable the Seikret’s autopathing, but dexterity-challenged hunters such as myself will surely rely on the hands-free navigation and I’m glad it’s an option.

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There are some additional options as well in the accessibility settings: the color blindness menu includes a helpful reference for identifying which setting best matches your needs, as well as motion sickness reduction and text framing options.

The only sound descriptions available are a bevy of subtitling options available for the campaign, falling short of what we’ve seen in other big budget games like Forza Horizon 5’s sign language or Halo Infinite’s UI narration and menu highlighting. However, I played through much of the campaign on a low volume due to my own hearing loss issues, and there was never a moment where I felt like I was missing a key audio cue—monsters tend to telegraph their every move well in advance of actually doing it, and roars produce a stream of visual distortion that persists even when the camera is facing the opposite direction.

Monster Hunter Wilds - a player in armor cheers — (Image credit: Capcom)

Monster Hunter Wilds feels good in my atrophied hands. I’ve had to make a few tweaks to accommodate my specific disability needs, but the accessibility features on offer have largely impressed me. Players with different needs, such as more limited use of one or multiple limbs may need to spend some time configuring macros and shortcuts via Steam Input.

While Wilds hardly dethrones accessibility titans like The Last of Us Part 2 or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the options on offer here are flexible and open enough that I feel like most players with accessibility needs will be able to make something work. The lack of rebindable keys and buttons is a shame—Steam Input works great for now, but having these options inside the game and not inside the menu of the launcher would have gone a ways to streamline the experience of setting up custom bindings.

When it comes to accessibility, Monster Hunter Wilds is still a helm-breaker long sword slash above the rest of the series, and it would be where I recommend new players start, both able-bodied and disabled.