The Monster Hunter series has been steadily building toward players and the large-scale battles they undertake into a more open world experience. With recent entries leaning into the scope of its setting, Capcom's daunting and equally thrilling monster-slaying action game has grown since finding its way back to consoles after years on handhelds, and the next game is bringing about the most significant changes the series has seen yet. Following the breakthrough success of Monster Hunter World , which brought an even larger audience to the series, Capcom aims to have Monster Hunter Wilds shake up the established structure and flow for the series' first open world game.
This intended shake-up hinges on bringing the series' epic battles into a more dynamic and interconnected world that's rife with emergent encounters against large-scale creatures and a more hostile ecosystem that evolves in real time. At Summer Game Fest 2024, we saw an extended demo of Monster Hunter Wilds and spoke with series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto, executive director and art director Kaname Fujioka, and game director Yuya Tokuda about how the next game puts its new open world in the spotlight, and how the massive success of the series has led them to rethink Monster Hunter for a global audience. What does an open world structure mean for Monster Hunter? Since its debut in 2003, the Monster Hunter series has focused on a timed mission-based structure that led players into excursions through connected zones t.
