Latest news with #Wilds'
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Behold, the Monster Hunter Wilds effect: Capcom's old Monster Hunter games sold even better in the past year despite 10 million copies of Wilds eating the fandom's time and money
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Capcom has released its latest financial earnings, and it seems nothing can stop Monster Hunter - not even Monster Hunter. Old entries in the venerable series are selling even better than they did the year before, collectively outstripping the sales of Monster Hunter Wilds itself. Monster Hunter Wilds sold an impressive 10.1 million units at launch, according to Capcom's FY24 earnings report. The financial year covers April 1, 2024 through March 31, 2025, which only encompasses the first month of Wilds' release, making the figure even more impressive. Five of Capcom's top six sellers for the year were Monster Hunter titles, broken up only by Resident Evil 4. Between World, Iceborne, Rise, and Sunbreak, the old MonHun games and expansions sold a collective 10.4 million units, just barely outdoing Wilds itself. It seems clear that anticipation for Wilds drove some of those sales. In FY23, the series sold a collective 9.4 million units, so this year's numbers are showing a pretty substantial bump. "Cumulative sales of the series overall surpassed 100 million units worldwide, helping to enhance the brand value of Monster Hunter," Capcom said in its report. Between Wilds and the rest of the series, Capcom's reporting 20.5 million Monster Hunter titles sold for FY24, and that led to what the publisher calls an "all-time high" of 51.9 million games sold across its entire catalog in the year. Fully 39% of Capcom's video game sales are now Monster Hunter-shaped, and I for one welcome our new Rathalos overlords. Check out our guide to the best Monster Hunter Wilds weapons.
The Guardian
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Monster Hunter Wilds review – prepare for the most epic fight of your life
After riding through a desert storm on a feathered steed, dust and rain whipping around you, you arrive at a mountain pass where purple crystals frost the walls. The weather still rages outside, but it's calm within the cavern that lies at the end of the path. You can tell, from the environment, what kind of creature lives here: the Rey Dau, a horned wyvern that commands the elements. You've seen it before, when it appeared unexpectedly while you were out on another expedition, descending from lightning-streaked skies to sink its claws into an unfortunate pack of shaggy, lion-like creatures. You weren't strong enough to face it then, but you are now. Hopefully. The fight that ensues is nail-biting. You have to pull out every trick you know to wear it down, trying to dive out of the path of powerful bolts of electricity, as well as the wyvern's horns and teeth. You fire your grappling hook at a rocky outcrop hanging from the ceiling, bringing it down on the creature. You whistle for your mount, leaping from its back on to the dragon's head, clinging on and stabbing with a dagger as it tries to smash you against the walls. You are sent flying, you are fried, you are stomped upon, but you cling on and keep fighting, chugging restorative potions at every opportunity. Then an even bigger predator appears from nowhere, takes the monster you've just fought desperately for 25 minutes in its jaws and tosses it around like a rag doll. Take a good look at it: that's what you'll be fighting next. Monster Hunter Wilds' 15-hour story is a series of escalating epic battles against ever bigger and more ferocious creatures. It does not let up for a second. Within a few hours, you will have fought an awful giant spider, a sinuous sand-dragon and a disgusting, overgrown oil-chicken. Later, you will face a furious fire-ape and a dragon that shoots lightning from its face, plus particularly nasty and dangerous versions of beasts from the previous 20 years' worth of Monster Hunter games. It's quite literally all killer, no filler, a far cry from the slow and ponderous older games, in which you had to spend hours gathering mushrooms and fighting raptors before you got anywhere near a wyvern. The battles are relentlessly awesome; when a monster fell, I would let out a breath that I didn't even realise I had be holding in. No game has ever made me feel like Monster Hunter does, with the possible exception of Dark Souls and its brethren. The adrenaline of these fights, the peerless, perfectly balanced feel of the oversized weapons and the sheer viciousness and majesty of the creatures makes this game feel incomparably thrilling, even though I have been playing it in some form since I was a teenager. And it is just so much better-looking than it was back then: not just the monsters, but also their huge natural habitats, which ripple and teem with life. I must admit that towards the end of Wilds' story I felt some disappointment start to creep in. I had enjoyed nearly every one of these creature clashes, which are wrapped in dramatic, beautifully rendered cutscenes that spin a cool-looking if rather insubstantial story. But I hadn't had much of a challenge. Admittedly, I have a lot of experience with these games, but I am used to getting eaten or torn to bits a few times by a new monster before I conquer it; in the entirety of Wilds' campaign, I was knocked out only twice. It turns out, however, that Wilds' story is essentially a 15-hour interactive tutorial on what makes Monster Hunter awesome, a rollercoaster of fighting thrills presumably designed to sell newcomers on the concept and give veterans a taste of the scale and visual splendour that Capcom's modern game engine has brought to their favourite series. The real fun starts afterwards. After taking on the biggest, baddest creature I had ever seen, in the final quest of the story, I was dumped back into a base camp in the jungle and sent out to capture a small, fire-spitting raptor. I was immediately humbled; embarrassingly, it knocked me out, because I had become lazy. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion Monster Hunter isn't just about waving an enormous lance around; it's also about studying your quarry, learning its weaknesses, scouring its environment for useful plants and materials used to make potions, tools and arrow-coatings that will give you an edge in a fight. It's about teaming up with other hunters, complementing each other's play styles, as more experienced players help the rookies through. Being a friend's Monster Hunter mentor is one of the most rewarding multiplayer gaming experiences out there. This game can't be reduced to a series of fights. It is a world, an ecosystem, a community of players. You are part hunter, part nature researcher. Wilds leans too far towards frictionless fun in its story, but once I was free to explore more I started to feel more connected to the habitat. Instead of being guided by the nose – or by my ostrich-dino steed – from battle to battle I was climbing up into the canopy and scouting for creatures, getting my binoculars out, discovering hidden corners for campsites and underwater caves full of useful materials. I found I had to switch weapons more frequently, upgrade my armour, reacquaint myself with the baffling array of jewels and doodads that gave my hunter useful extra skills. You could pick Wilds up as a newcomer and have a tremendous time playing through the story. You could stop there and it would still be worth the price of admission. But I will be playing it for a long time yet. Monster Hunter Wilds is out on 28 February; £59.99
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
