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BBC News
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Monster Hunter Wilds: How the series conquered the world
The latest release in one of Japan's most popular video game series has had one of the most successful debuts of all one million people were logged on to the PC version of Monster Hunter Wilds at the same time within hours of its launch, according to figures from online store have been complaints from the first wave of players on Steam about the game's performance on computers, but its critical response has been Newsbeat spoke to director Yuya Tokuda and producer Ryozo Tsujimoto prior to the release of Wilds about turning the game into a global hit. Monster Hunter first launched on the PlayStation 2 in 2004. As the title suggests, players spend the game navigating an area known as The Forbidden Lands capturing and battling a cast of increasingly fearsome fans of the series are drawn in by its challenging, complex systems and option to play co-operatively, teaming up with friends to take down massive foes. Breakout 2018 hit Monster Hunter World has has sold 21.3 million copies, according to publisher Capcom, rising to 28.1 million when sales of an upgraded 2019 edition are Mr Tsujimoto told BBC Newsbeat the game was a culmination of all the work and lessons learned from previous titles on the series. "Anything that we hadn't been doing we really tried to do with Monster Hunter World to get everything ready so that the game was ready to break through," he said. Games industry layoffs and studio closures in the West and Europe have led to fears of "brain drain" - a loss of knowledge as people leave companies or even look for work in different where employment protections for workers are much stronger, has not been as badly affected and developers often stay with the same company for a long Hunter director Mr Tokuda says he's worked on the series for 20 years and it's fed into his work on Wilds."It's the groundwork that you create with your previous titles that you hope can inform the success of later ones," he says."We have the ability to take data from past titles like Monster Hunter World and analyse that data in order to understand what players were enjoying and what we could improve."Other Japanese studios are known for taking this iterative approach and building on what has come Ga Gotoku Studio, the makers of the popular Yakuza series and its Like a Dragon spin-offs, have put out a new game more or less every year since 2020. The company's boss Masayoshi Yokoyama has spoken openly about how the team is happy to revisit previous locations and reuse elements from earlier games rather doing a "fresh reboot" each time. This can help to lower development costs and reduce the time it takes to make new titles. 'We're working in our own lanes' The Japanese games industry was a dominant force from the 1980s until the early 2000s, but a power shift saw Western developers begin to lead the way. More recently, the country has been behind some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful titles last year's Game Awards - described by some as the industry's answer to The Oscars - Japanese-made games occupied four of the six Game of the Year Tsujimoto says he can't pinpoint a specific reason for this, but says the Monster Hunter team has learned there are certain things needed to make a "triple-A success in today's market".That includes translating games into various languages so they can be released simultaneously in different countries, and being mindful of growing your audience."We're always careful to design the experience so new players can get into the game," he adds. Japan does face some of the same challenges as other developers habits are changing, with PC gaming increasing in popularity, and as technology becomes more advanced making games becomes more Tsujimoto says generational leaps "push the industry forward", bringing "new opportunities and new complexities". "I don't think it's necessarily the most difficult it's ever been but there are always new challenges whenever technology leaps forward."The games industry is also more competitive than ever - more video games are being released, and players are tending to stick with the same ones for longer leaves publishers of new releases fighting over a much smaller share of players' free time and 2025 has already been packed with big new Tsujimoto insists they haven't paid too much attention to that while working on Monster Hunter Wilds."It looks like a big year for everyone but we're really all just working in our own lanes," he says."We happened to have this launch window that's on the verge of some other big releases but we don't have access to that information before the general public."For an established series that suddenly explodes in popularity, Mr Tokuda says a big challenge is pleasing old and new fans."You always have in your mind that there's people waiting for your next creation and they're the players you want to satisfy," he says."But you also have your own creative idea and want to follow that through." Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.
The Guardian
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nature documentaries, pet lizards and spying on players: how Monster Hunter Wilds built a whole new world
My favourite thing about Monster Hunter is that despite the name, you often feel more like the prey than the predator. Even armed with a sword several times your own size and weight, you are often outmatched by the incredible creatures in this action game. In Monster Hunter Wilds, out next week, you are also frequently outmatched by the weather. A routine hunt for some relatively unthreatening creature can go awry as storm clouds gather, bringing with them some terrifying lightning-dragon that will eat you for breakfast. Monsters entangle with each other, tearing with teeth and claws as you turn tail and head for the hills. Over the past couple of weekends, players have been able to get hands-on with Wilds in beta tests, trying out the exquisite character creator and a couple of hunts against a horrid lion (Doshaguma) and an overgrown poisonous chicken (Gypceros). As someone old enough to have played these games on the PlayStation 2, and then later with my fingers contorted uncomfortably around a PlayStation Portable during a student year abroad in Japan, I am amazed and delighted by what Monster Hunter has become. What was once a stiff and densely complex game that hid all its thrills behind a barricade of mushroom-gathering quests is now a fluid, inviting and globally popular spectacle of a thing. Monster Hunter World, 2018's entry, broke Capcom records and reached 23m sales. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion Ryozo Tsujimoto, the series producer and son of Capcom's founder Kenzo Tsujimoto, has been with Monster Hunter since the early 00s, when he was a designer for Capcom's online games. Evidently it still excites him; he's been front and centre on a lot of Wilds' promotion. 'It's really energising for our team to watch so many people play the game at the same time,' he told me at the most recent Tokyo Game Show, where over 250,000 people turned up to try out forthcoming games. 'There's a lot of things we can only discover by watching players pick up the game and try it out, things we don't ever get to see in our own testing. We've got a few of the dev team undercover on the booth so they can watch how players are responding.' The main innovation in Wilds is how the monsters interact with each other. Previously herbivores would potter about grazing in herds, but it's only with the additional power of the current generation of consoles that the team had been able to create a seamless ecosystem where they'll come across each other and get into turf wars. 'Having creatures travel together in a realistic way is challenging in terms of making it look plausible,' says Yuya Tokuda, Wilds' director. 'If they all moved in perfect sync it would be a bit uncanny and unconvincing as a pack animal behaviour. But if each individual monster was a complete wildcard, like they were before, it would be untenable to keep it all together. Striking that balance between herd and pack behaviours while having individuality for each creature … that was a lot of work, and we had to get it going from nothing.' 'I think it's finally let us make the humans be part of the same ecosystem as everything else in the game,' adds Kaname Fujioka, the art director. 'The depiction of a totally seamless ecosystem where there's not even a loading screen between the base and the map itself is something that has only been possible on this generation.' Monster Hunter's creators have traditionally done their natural-behaviour research out in the real world on a kind of global team safari, getting a feel for different natural surroundings and recording ambient soundscapes that would later appear in the games. They've been to Argentina, Chile and Patagonia, places so remote that they had to subscribe to a satellite phone service because their phones wouldn't work. This time around, Covid restrictions kicked in right around the time that they would have been out on these research expeditions, so they had to make do with watching a lot of nature documentaries – except Tokuda, who has what he describes as a 'significant number' of pet lizards. He has created a special environment at home for them to roam around. Expectations are high for Wilds. Its publisher Capcom is on a run at the moment, having had several more big hits since the last Monster Hunter game in 2018, including popular remakes of its older Resident Evil horror titles – but Monster Hunter remains its makers' very biggest game. In fact it's now one of the world's biggest. At one point during its first open beta test last November, more than 460,000 people were playing Wilds at the same time. Tsujimoto is confident that Worlds can hold its own among gaming's apex predators. 'Any big blockbuster game is our competition now,' says Tsujimoto. 'That's the turf we've chosen.' Monster Hunter Wilds is out 28 February
