Monster Hunter Wilds director says changes to the ecosystem are persistent: 'Even as you return to base, the world outside is moving on and continuing where you left it in the background'

GamesActionMonster Hunter WildsMonster Hunter Wilds director says changes to the ecosystem are persistent: ‘Even as you return to base, the world outside is moving on and continuing where you left it in the background’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Capcom)

Monster Hunter Wilds

A decade ago, a Monster Hunter environment was essentially a series of battle rooms, with loading screens between each piece of the map. Chasing down a monster to finish it off meant having to put up with a few of those loads every hunt. With its two latest games, World and Rise, Capcom did away with that technical limitation, but another major bit of rigidity remained: every mission had to be selected from a job board or NPC, then launched to load into a predetermined world state.

In Monster Hunter Wilds, that’s gone, too.

Once you leave the hub and head out into the field to hunt, you can stay there as long as you want—setting up custom camps that serve as fast travel points with no loading, attacking monsters to automatically begin missions, and remaining in the field after slaying and carving up a monster. Those are all niceties that will cut down on the amount of time spent staring at loading screens, but Wilds is going deeper, maintaining the effects of your hunts on the ecosystem even when youdoreturn to the hub. According to game director Yuya Tokuda, there is no reset back to a “default” state.

“The ecosystem is consistently maintained,” Tokuda told me in an interview at Summer Game Fest. “Even as you return to base, the world outside is moving on and continuing where you left it in the background.”

“Let’s say you hunted doshaguma and reduced the number of them on the map. When we open the map the next time, if you want to find one to hunt, there might not be as many,” Tokuda said. “If you pull down some rocks that hang in a cave to attack a monster, it’ll be a while before those are ready again, because they kind of ‘develop’ on their own timescale. So that will affect the next time you go there.”

(Image credit: Capcom)

Monster Hunter Wilds

Perhaps a game world dozens of hours into its simulation won’t feel all that different from the one we first set foot into, but I’m hopeful we end up really seeing and feeling the impact of our hunts after hours and hours in the field. Capcom has made sure that any ripple effects won’t lead to any frustrating extinction events, though:

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In other important news, Tokuda gave me a hint of what to expect from Wilds’ iteration of Monster Hunter’s most important weapon: thehunting horn.

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