<figure id="attachment_2995433" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2995433" style="width: 1600px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-2995433 size-full" src="https://media.freemalaysiatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/3afe5423-monster-afp-pic-260225.webp" alt="" width="1600" height="1000" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-2995433" class="wp-caption-text">The ‘Monster Hunter’ series has shipped more than 108 million units since the first release on Playstation 2. (AFP pic)</figcaption></figure>
PARIS: With &#8220;Monster Hunter Wilds&#8221; pitting intrepid players against a menagerie of rampaging beasts on PC and consoles from Friday, the game&#8217;s creators tell AFP they hope the 20-year-old franchise can still find new audiences.
It has been seven years since the last major instalment saw fans draw oversized swords and bows together, in a series whose success is built on cooperative play to take down dragons and other spectacularly-rendered creatures.
Co-op is &#8220;really the heart of the series and at the core of its DNA,&#8221; said the game&#8217;s director Yuya Tokuda.
Long queues to test the new instalment at conventions and mass participation in an online open test weekend in October have underscored the anticipation in recent months.
&#8220;Rather than feeling pressure&#8230; it&#8217;s actually more of a useful chance for us to see the players&#8217; reactions and also get data about what it is we should be working on,&#8221; Ryozo Tsujimoto, the series&#8217; 50-something long-time producer said during a trip to Europe weeks ahead of the release.
&#8220;Wilds&#8221; is the first &#8220;Monster Hunter&#8221; instalment built for latest-generation consoles.
Tsujimoto says this will allow for &#8220;even more seamless&#8221; play, highlighting that there will be no loading screens between players&#8217; base camp and the monster-haunted open world beyond.
Such changes &#8220;make you feel like you really are part of the ecosystem from start to finish every time you play the game,&#8221; he said.
But even on more powerful machines, it was &#8220;really quite difficult&#8221; to populate the environment with the huge numbers of monsters and other creatures that the developers wanted, Tsujimoto added.
There were &#8220;lots of programming challenges and also hardware challenges,&#8221; he said.
Stoking the hype
The &#8220;Monster Hunter&#8221; series has shipped more than 108 million units since the first release on Playstation 2, making it a second tentpole franchise for Japanese publisher Capcom alongside the &#8220;Resident Evil&#8221; zombie saga.
It took time and several instalments for &#8220;Monster Hunter&#8221; to win popularity outside Japan itself.
Back then, &#8220;we didn&#8217;t really have a development schedule&#8230; set up for simultaneous localised release around the world,&#8221; Tsujimoto remembers.
That meant delays of up to a year for different language versions to be adapted, undermining the hype around new releases beyond the home market.
&#8220;All the news about what was going to be in the game, which monsters and features, had already come out globally, players felt like they&#8217;d seen it all from looking online,&#8221; Tsujimoto said.
These days releases are synchronised around the world to strike while the anticipation is at its peak.
Broadening reach
&#8220;Monster Hunter&#8221; has also benefited from vastly more players able to join in online with high-quality connections.
&#8220;Breaking down each of those barriers&#8230; is what finally brought us out of niche status in the West and into a global blockbuster,&#8221; Tsujimoto said.
Nevertheless, &#8220;there are still people out there who don&#8217;t know about &#8216;Monster Hunter&#8217;,&#8221; he added.
It was up to the studio to &#8220;try and find new ways to make sure that the &#8216;Monster Hunter&#8217; name spreads among as large an audience around the world as possible&#8221;.
A first film set in the universe of the games, released in 2020, was a relative flop.
That hasn&#8217;t put off Tsujimoto, who says &#8220;image licensing&#8221; is &#8220;something we&#8217;re always considering as being on the table&#8221;.
Although naming no plans for the immediate future, the producer is &#8220;always thinking of ways to expand the series around the world&#8221;, including to &#8220;people who don&#8217;t play games&#8221;, he said.
Tsujimoto and Tokuda did not comment on whether &#8220;Wilds&#8221; would be available for Nintendo&#8217;s hotly-anticipated Switch 2 console, set for release later this year.
But looking to the future, &#8220;we do still have plenty of monster ideas up our sleeves,&#8221; Tokuda said.

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