Monster Hunter Wilds is a certifiable hit, with a record breaking 8 million copies sold just over its launch weekend. There’s plenty of reasons for the game to be successful, but I would argue that its day one support for cross-platform play drew many to the game. It sure helped with my friend group, giving us the ability to play together like we had for the previous Monster Hunter Rise on the Switch. However unlike other Monster Hunter titles before it, Wilds actively makes this difficult in all new, and frustrating, ways.
Explore a brand new world! No, not like that!
This is largely due to the choices Capcom makes for Wilds’ narrative presentation. Previous games in the franchise used a method of multiple (sometimes one too many) cutscenes in between quests to deliver the story. This allowed for players to see what parts of the story they wanted, while critically being able to party together for each quest, without cutscene status impacting much beyond when players entered gameplay.Wilds, on the other hand, eschews cutscenes where it can in favor of guided walking segments through its vast environment.
By design, the placement of these narrative sections lock players into a single-player experience. It’s so aggressive, two players cannot join one another on the exact same quest and see the story play out together. The end result is the inevitability of waiting for a player to get through these segments to actually join their quest, only to wait again immediately after. This cycle of waiting has a downright negative impact on the Monster Hunter experience. I’ve seen it very anecdotally with everyone I’ve played with: smashing buttons to skip through dialogue as quickly as possible to get to the meat. And look at reactions to producer Ryozo Tsujimoto suggesting that the game’s high sales come from this story structure:
I've heard the polar opposite from almost every single person I've ever seen talk about the game, both friends and internet personalities.
Crossplay yes, but I skipped most of the cutscenes and mashed to end the dialogue because it kept my bonking time low instead of high.
— Krakenstein and Associates (@krakenstein.bsky.social) 2025-03-11T13:39:54.770Z
Look I enjoyed the story but common let's be fr
— 💛Marv 🏳️⚧️💜 (@nucleargoth.bsky.social) 2025-03-11T14:11:38.067Z
Scale is not enough
Frankly, it’s pretty bonkers to see such an analysis when so much of the rest of Monster Hunter Wilds’ design is focused on the larger connected experience. Starting the game connects players online and puts them in lobbies full of other Hunters running around. The aforementioned cross-play and multiplatform launch removes friction that hamstrung previous titles. If anything, it is as if two entirely different trains of thought were happening at once: one that understands the fundamental power of multiplayer in this franchise and one that really wants to make a single player narrative experience. And I have a theory as to why that is.
Like another long running monster franchise with performance issues, Monster Hunter Wilds boasts the largest open world in series history. Games in this series have had big and different biomes before, but now they are massive, more detailed, and fully interconnected. Because that’s what games are now. Just like the other franchises, now that Wilds has this larger than ever space it has a challenge. It has to actually find a way to get players to use it.
Open world games in this day and age all have to solve this same dilemma. How can players be persuaded to explore and appreciate all this hard development work? Some games use tons of collectibles, others use side quests. Monster Hunter, a franchise in which players use any and all resources to further their quest for better gear, chooses to make players lazily walk from one biome’s border to the next. A baffling choice for a series that already has well trained its players to track every nook and cranny for resources and hunting targets that have their own migration patterns.
The story isn’t the point
Regardless of the quality of Monster Hunter Wilds’ narrative — it’s serviceable — this is a mechanical decision. A decision that is at odds with the rest of the game’s identity. In chasing the industry standard of scale, Monster Hunter does itself a disservice. Not enough to make Wilds a bad game, but enough to disconnect players from its attempts to tell a larger story and roll their eyes at the world rather than gaze in awe. The game could have easily told this story without this execution. It could have also trusted its players to do what they’ve always done and learn the environment anyway.
Some day, the industry will learn that an endless horizon isn’t engaging or exciting on its own anymore. Open world games can be magnificent works, of course. Grafting pieces of those onto games with their own identities will more often than not lead to diminishing returns. We can only hope that the only mistaken take away Capcom has from the success from Wilds is that people like the story. The game’s true merits shine when you get through the story and can actually play properly with your friends.
Monster Hunter Wilds is available now on PS5, Xbox, and Steam.
Featured images are screenshots captured by author on PS5. Monster Hunter Wilds game ©CAPCOM.
Travis Hymas is a freelance writer and self appointed Pokémon historian out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Known to be regularly obessive over pop culture topics, gaming discourse, and trading card games, he is a published critic featured on sites such as Uppercut and The Young Folks.
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