# Monster Hunter Wilds

Monster Hunter Wilds is a 2025 action role-playing game developed and published by Capcom. A successor to Monster Hunter: World (2018), the game released worldwide for Windows, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S, with support for cross-platform play, on February 28, 2025.
As with other Monster Hunter games, Wilds has the player control a Hunter that is part of a guild assigned to explore the Forbidden Lands, a nearly uninhabitable area with multiple biomes and dangerous storms. During their exploration, the Hunter must fight large monsters that threaten their group, either by killing or capturing them. The Hunter then can collect resources from their victories, as well as from gathering in the field, to synthesize new weapons and armor with better attributes that allows the Hunter to fight stronger monsters. The player has an option of using fourteen different weapon types in combat, each with different combat maneuvers. New to Wilds is the ability to carry up to two weapons into the field using their mounted bird-like Seikrets to swap gear, the ability to set up pop-up camps within the game's open world to create a more seamless hunting experience, and a wound system that allows the player to target weak points on a monster to inflict more damage.
Within three days of release, Wilds sold more than 8 million copies, making it Capcom's fastest-selling game to date.

## Gameplay

Similar to its predecessor, Wilds is an action role-playing video game played from a third-person perspective. In Wilds, players take the role of a custom Hunter character who travels to the "Forbidden Lands", a landmass filled with monsters, in order to locate a missing expedition party. As with previous games in the series, the player's Hunter tracks and fights monsters, either capturing or slaying them, from which they gain rewards in the form of monster parts and other resources. Along with other resources collected in the game world, the player can then craft new armour, weapons, consumables, and other gear which allow them to fight more difficult monsters.
The game world features several biomes, each of which is a large open world for players to freely explore. In Wilds, players can seamlessly move between the larger world and their hunter village where they can cook food, replenish their supplies, and craft new gear. Quests can also be started whenever players locate their targets in the wilds. The game introduces a type of mount named Seikret which aids player exploration and directs them towards their current objective, and can also be ridden while in combat. The Seikret allows the player character to carry two distinct weapons while hunting monsters, though armour can only be changed in the village.
All 14 types of weapons from World return in Wilds, though new moves and actions were introduced. The Slinger also returns in Wilds with new features added, allowing players to grab items from afar and trigger environmental hazards. The game features a Focus mode enabling players to launch targeted attacks against specific body parts of a monster. Wounds on a monster can be further exploited to deal extra damage. Monsters in the game will interact with each other, with predators hunting prey and certain monsters exhibiting herd behaviors to better protect themselves. Weather and time of day also affect the behaviours of monsters, some of which appearing only when the weather condition favours them.
The game supports four-player cooperative multiplayer, though players who prefer to play solo can enlist the help of three support hunters controlled by artificial intelligence to aid them. As with World, a player can launch an SOS flare to bring either these live or computer-controlled allies to aid in the middle of a hunt. The game includes an option for players with arachnophobia by replacing models of spider-like creatures with amorphous blobs, though this does not apply to large monsters, such as Nerscylla.

## Plot

A group of explorers led by former hunter Fabius find a young boy named Nata, unconscious and injured in the wasteland. Nata claims to hail from the Forbidden Lands, a harsh, uncharted region of the Old World that has been isolated for over two thousand years and was presumed to be uninhabited by the guild. Nata also claims that he and his people, the Keepers, were attacked by the "White Wraith", a monster previously thought to be extinct. Hearing about this, Fabius summons a recently promoted Hunter and their Palico companion to serve as Nata's guardians to escort him back to his home despite there being no information about the Keepers, as well as the investigation of the White Wraith. The hunter, the Palico, and Nata are joined by Alma, a guild handler, Gemma, a skilled blacksmith, Olivia, a veteran hunter, Athos, Olivia’s Palico, Erik, a botanist, and Werner, a Guild Engineer whom Gemma admires.
As the groups expedition to the Forbidden Lands begins, they forced to make a slight detour to save a young native girl, Nona from sand-dwelling worm-like Balahara. After saving her using a Seikret, a travel mount that the hunter gains, Nona requests that the hunter find her brother Y'sai, who was separated from her. The hunter and Alma eventually find Y'sai and protect him from a Chatacabra, a large ape-like amphibian. Out of gratitude, they take the group to their village for a meal, although they have no information regarding the Keepers, they suggest checking out the Scarlet Forest, the dense tropical locale in the Forbidden Lands. The hunter alongside Olivia are later forced to repel the locale's apex predator, the aquatic leviathan Uth Duna. The fight is however suddenly interrupted by the appearance of an albino wyvern with chain-like appendages on it's arms before it kills Uth Duna through a non-physical method of attack, with Nata recognizing the creature as the White Wraith itself.

## Development

Wilds was developed by Capcom, using their internal RE Engine. Following the large influx of players from Monster Hunter World, the developers spent more time on research and development to determine what features they wanted to include to meet the wider range of players anticipated for Wilds, according to art director Kaname Fujioka. By 2024, Wilds had been in development for at least five to six years.
The team strove to create a realistic ecosystem and simulate a natural environment in the game. According to Yuya Tokuda, the game's director, players can observe the life forms in the game as they live out their life cycles, and watch how monsters interact with each other. Monsters do not stay in a single location on the map and will instead move around freely. Predators follow prey, and the state of the world is persistent. Players can use the changing environment to their advantage, but the effects of their actions cannot be undone even if they quit the game or return to the settlement. The team also decided to move away from the "excursion" model of previous games and introduce a larger, more seamless world to encourage players to interact with the game's various gameplay systems. To further increase immersion, the player-controlled character, as well as their feline companions (known as the Palico) are fully voiced. The team listened to feedback from players of World and Rise, and decided to make exploration more accessible for players through the introduction of mounts that automatically guide players to their target.
Monster Hunter Wilds was announced in December 2023 at The Game Awards. The game released for Windows PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S and Series X on February 28, 2025, and was the first game in the series to see simultaneous release on all launch platforms. The game was made available for public demonstration at the 2024 Gamescom show, where it won four show awards selected by attendees, including Most Epic, Most Entertaining, Best PlayStation Game, and Best Trailer.
Downloadable content is planned for the title, though according to Tsujimoto, these will remain as only cosmetic items such as layered armor gear, and will not be "pay-to-win items". Free content updates, referred to as 'Title Updates' are planned to be released free of charge in the future, as with previous Monster Hunter games, with the first, featuring the monster Mizutsune alongside additional updates, releasing in Spring 2025, with further updates planned in the future.
The open beta for Monster Hunter Wilds, which began on October 26, 2024, attracted over 460,000 concurrent players on Steam, highlighting significant player interest despite some reported technical issues. The game was nominated for Most Anticipated Game at the Game Awards in November 2024.

## Reception

Aggregate scores :
| Aggregator | Score |
| Metacritic | PS5: 89/100 Win: 88/100 XSXS: 90/100 |
| OpenCritic | 95% recommend |
Review scores :
| Publication | Score |
| Destructoid | 9.5/10 |
| Eurogamer | 4/5 |
| GameSpot | 8/10 |
| GamesRadar+ | 4.5/5 |
| PC Gamer (US) | 85/100 |
| PCGamesN | 9/10 |
| PCMag | 4/5 |
| Push Square | 9/10 |
| Shacknews | 9/10 |
| TechRadar | 4.5/5 |
| Video Games Chronicle | 5/5 |
| VG247 | 5/5 |
Monster Hunter Wilds received "generally favorable" reviews from critics for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions, earning an average score of 90 out of 100, with the Windows version receiving "generally favorable" reviews with an average score of 88 out of 100, according to review aggregator Metacritic. OpenCritic determined that 95% of critics recommended the game.
On the day of release, over 1.3 million concurrent users were playing Wilds via Steam, the highest concurrent Steam player count for any Capcom game and the sixth highest for any game on Steam to date. The following day, the game reached over 1.38 million concurrent players on Steam, which established it as the fifth highest game by this metric. A large number of user reviews in the two days after the game's release criticized Wilds performance on Windows which drove its overall user reviews below 50% positive on Steam. Users complained the graphics looked awful and had very low frame-rates even on high-end modern PC hardware.

### Sales

In a press release on March 4th, 2025 Capcom announced that Monster Hunter Wilds had sold over 8 million units in the 3 days after the game's global launch, making it the fastest selling game in Capcom's history. Capcom claimed that the success was due to advertising the game to a broad worldwide audience and holding online beta tests prior to the launch of the game.
In Japan, Wilds set the record for the largest physical sales launch of any Play Station 5 title, selling 1.5 million copies in its first week. This was in spite of physical sales representing a lower percentage of sales compared to previous Monster Hunter titles, likely due to the rise in digital distribution since the release of its predecessors.