5 hours with Monster Hunter Wilds soothed my beta fears, but I left more impressed by its storytelling chops

I've never needed much story from Monster Hunter. Each game's plot follows a predictable pattern: Something is upsetting the ecology, and you need to battle a few dozen frenzied lizards until you and the Hunter's Guild uncover what never-before-seen creature is responsible for the turmoil.

But Monster Hunter never suffered for it. Its megafauna are majestic enough, its combat climactic enough, its cast of pun-slinging NPCs charming enough that even a barebones narrative could suffice.

After playing through the first five hours of Monster Hunter Wilds, however, I'm just as excited to see more of its storytelling as I am for indulging in its latest iteration of dinosaur swordfights.

In late November, I visited Capcom's headquarters in Osaka to spend a few hours with the game and speak to its lead developers. Considering the Wilds open beta didn't inspire confidence in how well it'll run on PC when it launches in February, I arrived in Osaka wondering primarily about performance.

Performance anxiety

My preview session was running on a PlayStation 5, which is only so useful to compare with my experience in the Steam beta. However, while the beta's PS5 version might not have featured the origami monsters players encountered on PC, PS5 beta players reported their own framerate and performance stumbles. Compared to those descriptions, the updated build I played in Osaka, locked in the quality-focused Resolution Mode, was smooth—free of any jarring framerate dips.

Other press at the preview event who'd played the beta on PS5 said it was a marked performance improvement, lending some believability to Capcom's claims during the beta that the full game was already "more improved." Monster Hunter Wilds game director Yuya Tokuda, speaking via interpreter at the event, said that players on PC should expect similar improvements. "We feel you can really feel the difference in the improved framerate," Tokuda said. "The same level of framerate improvement will also be implemented on the PC for the final product."

Where the open beta prescribed two prepackaged hunts with premade equipment, my Osaka demo session covered the first five hours of the finished product. From character creation through introductory quests and story-driven hunts in the game's Windward Plains and Scarlet Forest regions, I was free to hunt—with all that entails. As I alternated between story quests and self-selected side hunts, I was gathering my own monster materials, crafting my own mega potions, and gradually cobbling together an armor set from early-game options.

It didn't take long for me to start admiring the tweaks Capcom's made to the Monster Hunter combat formula. Whether battling familiar beta foes in the Windward Plains, like the amphibian Chatacabra and burly Doshaguma, or fresh opponents like the Scarlet Forest's hellish, spidery Lala Barina, my hunter's ability to navigate and respond to monster attacks felt more fluid than ever.

I've lately been a hammer main in Monster Hunter, so I'm used to a good amount of combat mobility. But in Wilds, even the hammer feels more nimble. Between attack animations, many weapons have gained windows where holding the analogue stick in a direction will slightly shift the hunter's footing, giving opportunities to adjust my angle of attack or scoot out of harm's way without committing to a full dodge roll and interrupting my combo.

I still had to pay attention to my positioning, but I felt more willing to seek out windows for landing heavy hammer upswings because I knew I'd be less likely to find myself whiffing the monster's exposed jaw by just a couple inches.

That quality combat time also meant I could get familiar with Wilds's new Focus Mode, which allows manually "aiming" attacks with the left trigger. While aiming in Focus Mode, any wounded areas on the monster are highlighted. Hitting those areas with special Focus Strike attacks unleashes a heavy finisher. In practice, opening wounds and attacking them is an express route to dealing massive damage to monsters, which is apparently the idea.

"When hunting the monsters, there are hard parts of the body that when you attack it, you bounce off. It can be hard to tell when you're fighting them which parts are really affected or not," Tokuda said. "Monster Hunter tends to have a longer hunting play time. We wanted to make it more efficient so that [players] could hunt efficiently in a shorter amount of time."

In terms of efficiency, Focus Mode works—almost too well. The wound-destroying Focus Strikes are satisfying, but in some of my preview session's low rank hunts I was opening and destroying monster wounds so constantly that it wasn't really worth it to use conventional attacks. That's a little concerning, but I'm not raising an alarm yet. It's a system I expect will shine most as monster health scales upwards in multiplayer hunts and high rank quests.

Updated outfitting

Monster Hunter's armor skills are changing, too. In Monster Hunter, your equipment defines how you play. You don't have a skill tree or stat points to spend; you craft armor pieces that increase your attack, boost your ability to guard, or help sharpen your weapons more quickly, matching the theming of the monster whose parts those armor pieces were made from. In Wilds, however, many of those offensive skills are now found on weapons instead.

The change, Tokuda said, was to let players use the new mid-hunt weapon swapping mechanic without feeling like they're restricted by their armor loadout. In World and Rise, my hammer and switch axe sets relied on entirely different offensive skills; even if I could have swapped between the two, switching weapons would've immediately made a lot of the armor skills I had equipped irrelevant.

I might still end up with an armor set that's slightly more optimized for my hammer, but if more of my offensive, weapon-centric skills come from my weapons themselves, my general-use armor skills should still provide utility when I swap to switch axe. "It allows a more diverse and free selection of finding armors and ways of hunting," Tokuda said.

While I'm excited for the potential dual-weapon loadouts and the changes to combat, I'd have needed a few dozen more hours to plumb the depths of those revamped systems. Instead, what left the greatest impression during my preview session was Monster Hunter's newfound focus on storytelling.

Creating character

As Capcom started doling out Wilds reveals and preview trailers, I was skeptical about the emphasis I was seeing on cutscenes and character beats. As much as I've loved the Guildmarms and Meowscular Chefs of yesteryear, Monster Hunter NPCs traditionally haven't enjoyed much depth. They've mostly served as manic, madcap hype men, each with their own personal brand of pun.

Playing Wilds, however, I was surprised to find myself in full dialogue sequences with other characters—and even more surprised to be invested in them. Unlike player characters in previous games, the player hunter in Wilds is a fully-voiced character with a preexisting hunter career, which my companions would reference and prompt me to explain. In turn, I could ask Alma, my handler, about her training at the Guild academy; I could ask Gemma, the expedition's blacksmith, about other hunter squads she's helped outfit.

I'm used to my fellow members of the Hunter's Guild feeling like a passive audience while my character handled all the work. In the early hours of Wilds, they feel like members of an actual organization, composed of people with their own histories. It's a change I hadn't expected, but it's one I'm eager to see explored further.

A story I'm even more interested to see play out is the Guild's delicate position in the Forbidden Lands. Shortly after arriving in the region, thought to be uninhabited for thousands of years, the Guild discovers that it's anything but. There, people have spent millennia surviving the harsh, cyclical ecology of the Forbidden Lands—and they've done it without the Hunter's Guild's combat tech.

Kaname Fujioka, executive director and art director for Monster Hunter Wilds, said that the development team wanted to explore what role the hunters would play in ecologies and societies they're interacting with for the first time. "We want to show what the hunters exactly are in a world like that," Fujioka said. "We feel that the story and the setting is designed to really question and make you think about, 'What is a hunter?'"

In what I played, the best lens for that question is Nata, a boy discovered by the Guild shortly after it had touched down in the Forbidden Lands. Nata's the sole survivor of a village destroyed by Arkveld, the Wilds mascot monster and primary subject of the Guild's investigation. By accompanying the Guild, Nata's gone from losing his home to living among people who've trained themselves to face the rampages that threaten villages like his own. From what I've seen, it's left him with a deep sense of doubt, guilt, and powerlessness.

Towards the end of my demo session, Nata joined the hunters on an excursion. In the aftermath of a battle with a new monster, as Nata struggled to keep his composure, one of the veteran hunters tried to ground him by asking him two questions: "Why does a hunter exist? To what end do we carry these weapons?"

I'm looking forward to watching Monster Hunter find the answer.