Screenshot: Kotaku / Capcom
Monster Hunter Wilds is looking like it’s going to be one of the biggest games of 2025 already, and its showing at Gamescom is going incredibly well. The game is playable for the first time to the public, and the amount of information coming out of just that preview build is insane. We’ve learned a lot just from three days of developer interviews and fans collating all the info they’ve gleaned from the demo, and here’s just some of the biggest things we’ve spotted over the past week.
Screenshot: Kotaku / Capcom
As you might expect, a new Monster Hunter game is bound to pack in a bunch of quality-of-life changes that series veterans and newcomers alike will appreciate. One of the biggest tweaks comes to Monster Hunter Wilds’ map, which is now 3D. In the past, maps have been flat while trying to communicate the sheer density of the different biomes, which made them a bit of a confusing mess for players who weren’t already familiar with the layouts of the areas. Now, it should be much easier to maneuver across Wilds’ huge new environments.
When you’re in a big fight, you’re typically picking at weak points in the hope of crippling the monster’s movement or abilities and getting monster parts, which used to break off and appear as shiny bits you needed to manually collect. That no longer seems to be entirely the case, and now when you break parts of the monster, you’ll automatically pick up smaller pieces, meaning you don’t have to scramble in or out of combat to get every last scrap now. You’ll still need to carve bigger pieces, like tails, and dead monsters can now be climbed on in order to harvest them. And hey, if you’re hurting after a fight or on your way to another one and don’t want to choose between your different potions, there’s now a dynamic healing option that’ll pick the best fit based on your health.
Funnily enough, explosive barrels (which used to be static) can now be picked up and thrown at enemies, and potentially even teammates. There’s a million little changes like this that should make dealing with all the nuts-and-bolts stuff outside of monster-killing simpler and more approachable than in its predecessors. Oh, and as a fun aside that I’ll also chalk up to “quality-of-life changes,” explosive barrels (which used to be static) can now be picked up and thrown at enemies, and potentially even teammates. Look, being able to troll my friends is important to the “quality” of my “life.” It counts!
Screenshot: Kotaku / Capcom
That’s not all that Capcom’s been up to, though. If you’re playing the game in single-player mode, you can now pause, which hasn’t been available for a while, and you can even skip the quest-end timer in solo play and multiplayer, assuming everyone agrees to skip it. Finishing a hunt will no longer kick you back to camp either, and on that note, you can also pick up quests in the field dynamically. Just running across a monster can trigger its hunt, so you no longer have to initiate missions from the village.
It also appears that you can dodge out of certain moves or sheathe your weapon mid-animation, which is going to save people tons of time and hardship. Previously, Monster Hunter players have had to simply commit to the animation of whatever attack they unleashed, whether it connected or not, which could open them up to attacks from the massive monsters that they’re charged with hunting.
Screenshot: Kotaku / Capcom
Monster Hunter games have always been big on multiplayer, typically allowing squads of up to four players (as well as smaller AI companions) to take on hunts and synergize their loadouts to maximize the results of the missions. In a drastic change, Monster Hunter Wilds now features AI hunters that can support the player in hunts if desired. SOS flares can now be customized to only summon NPCs or players depending on what you want, but by default they will populate the game with NPCs if you can’t find a party to play with.
One of the smaller but still significant features to return in Monster Hunter Wilds is the ability to swim underwater. Though it has existed in previous games and underwater combat was included in Monster Hunter 3 and 3 Ultimate, water sections have largely been MIA for the last several installments due to the polarizing reception to them in the past. Though Wilds doesn’t have underwater combat, the team seems to be testing the waters (so to speak) by implementing underwater areas again at all, which has some fans hoping that DLC may eventually bring the full feature back.
Screenshot: Kotaku / Capcom
I used to think that the Insect Glaive, one of Monster Hunter’s more ludicrous and complex weapons, was a very niche loadout, but turns out a lot of people love it and especially appreciate the air acrobatics it allowed players to do. That no longer seems to be the case in Wilds, which appears to have nerfed the bounce that players would get off of a mid-air slashing combo. The thing effectively let you stay in the air forever, and while it looked quite silly, it was also great at making the class visually distinct from others, which are largely terrestrial.
Screenshot: Kotaku / Capcom
In a win for truly everyone, armor is no longer gender-locked in Monster Hunter Wilds. This has never been the case before, and has meant that sometimes a player couldn’t get armor they really wanted because they locked themselves in when choosing their character’s gender as they were customizing them. Now, you can slap on whatever you want. Additionally, armors have bonuses for completing sets, but there will also be bonuses for armor pieces from different monsters as long as they fit a common theme!
Screenshot: Kotaku / Capcom / PlayStation
The Monster Hunter series has some of the most entertaining weapons in all of gaming, and incredibly deep mechanics for each one. Think of a weapon in these games as the equivalent of a fighting game character, complete with their own moveset, unique combos, and latent abilities. Not only are most of them getting tweaked or reworked in some way, but now Capcom is adding perfect-timing mechanics to a slew of them, too.
Screenshot: Kotaku / Capcom
Monster Hunter Wilds features dynamic weather effects called Inclemencies that roll through the biomes and drastically change the nature of the arena. The most common one we’ve seen through trailers and previews is a mixture of a sandstorm and thunderstorm, and these will affect monsters and hunters alike. However, even outside of these effects, aspects of the environment can set you up for failure. On one of the developer streams out of Gamescom, the players lured one monster to a sand dune that caused the monster to trip over itself more easily, making it vulnerable to more attacks from the hunters. Another creature that could crawl on surfaces that players couldn’t reach could be toppled and stunned by using the hunter’s slinger (and specifically the grapple ability on it) to bring the column it was climbing on down.
In case you haven’t realized, there’s a lot to cover that’s new in Monster Hunter Wilds. For example, you will be able to cook meals that account for changes in the climate, such as whipping up foodthat negates the effects of cold or hot weather. Mounting monsters in this game is also pretty similar to how it functioned in Monster Hunter World and you now have more moves when you’re riding a creature. Alongside the basic dagger plunge, you can now do a heavy attack and a signature finisher based on your weapon.
That isn’t all either. Large dung pods can be used to disperse herds of monsters, which is going to be especially helpful since Wilds seems to be going in on monsters that have swarms of little minions. There are also now up-close Power Clash moments, such as perfect guarding with a shield which results in a quick-time event where you beat back the monster. When a monster is going to unleash a particularly nasty attack, your life bar will also flash quite dramatically to warn you to guard or dodge out of the way. There’s literally too many cool polishes and changes to count.
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