Welcome back to Save State, where we like to get a little wild. Monster Hunter Wilds had its first beta in the last couple of weeks, and, of course, being the obsessed Monster Hunter fan I am, I hunted all of the monsters in the beta with multiple weapons and terrorized the local wildlife for fun. The first thing I did was spend multiple hours in the character creator, as is tradition, but it’s worth mentioning how amazing and in-depth character creation is in Wilds. You can make everything from your standard attractive characters to celebrities and even Handsome Squidward or Chucky if you really want to.
The Monster Hunter Wilds beta shows off some of the early story elements, with an expedition setting forth into a forbidden zone after learning there may be people living there that the rest of the world didn’t know about. A tidal wave of worm-like Balahara swim through the sands of the desert, which prompts a rescue attempt that ends with players hunting a large, loveable frog monster called Chatacabra. Poor Chatacabra is basically the training monster- it licks at you to do a lot of its attacks, but deals very little damage and attacks slowly, perfect for letting new players get used to the controls.
After hunting the Chatacabra, there’s another optional quest players can do in hunting an alpha Doshaguma, one of the absolutely ugliest rugs of fur in the series. Due to the fact that these are monsters that travel in packs, you have to separate the alpha from the rest of the group in order to take it out. Or you can do what I did and just start attacking the alpha, and the other two Doshaguma just leave because they got bored or something. I’m sure what I experienced was a bug of some kind, but it was really funny that this was supposed to show off how packs of monsters will come after players in Wilds, but it just didn’t work that time.
After that, you’re basically free to do whatever you like. There are Balahara you can hunt, as well as a powerful and fun Rey Dau lurking about the map. Balahara is a large worm creature that twists around and commonly gets bugged in the environment. But when its pathfinding was working properly and it wasn’t spinning like a top for no reason, it was a fun hunt. It’s a monster that looks like the Magic card Wurmcoil Engine, and it even spits out oil at you too. Rey Dau, on the other hand, is a more traditional flying wyvern that can shoot lightning at you like a railgun, and it even glasses the sands if you dodge the attack, which is great attention to detail.
As far as details go, the environment is littered with things to interact with, and there are little creatures to take pictures of or capture with your net. If you’re walking through the temporary camp the hunters establish in the sandy plains region, there may be little creatures scurrying about that should you bump into them, will get knocked over by you. A great pastime of kick the baby, I guess.
Most of the weapons in the beta have received some pretty major overhauls, or at least a few big changes to some portions of their kit. Every weapon gains a new feature in Focus Mode, which lets most of those change the direction of their attacks for more fluid combat (whereas in older games, you’d pick a direction and if you whiff, you whiff). Weapons like the greatsword, which charges up to deliver one devastating blow, become massively improved by this and are significantly more newcomer friendly since you can change the angle of your big attack if a monster doesn’t sit still for 3 full seconds.
You also have a new wounding system, where parts of a monster’s body will glow red after enough damage has been dealt (or after they do a specific attack like Rey Dau’s railgun). You can use Focus Attacks to deal even more damage to these sensitive parts of a monster. Heavy bowgun players, for example, can shove the barrels of their gun right into a monster’s mouth and fire until the part breaks. Some weapons benefit from wound breaking more than others- charge blade gets a significant boost to its axe mode if it’s the one responsible for breaking the wound, but every weapon at least contributes damage with these new mechanics.
Hunting with friends took a considerable amount of effort, as the beta’s lobbies hosted 100 players apparently. But if you specifically just wanted to hunt with your friends, you’d need to pick them out of the lobby, form a link party with them, and then you can use the environment link option to pull you and your friends into the same map so you can explore and do quests together. This mostly just involved a lot of obtuse menuing and at least one web search to figure it all out. If you’re not in a link session, when you leave the camp, all the other players just disappear, and you’re not guaranteed to get your friends in your quests if you post one. Now that I know what to do, it’s fine, but for about 5 minutes it seemed more complicated than it should have been.
Performance in the beta was… interesting. The first couple of hunts ran quite well, keeping a steady 60fps at 1440p with frame generation off but all other settings to high. When the lightning storm happened during a Rey Dau hunt, however, performance absolutely tanked to 30-40fps even with a 5800x3D CPU (which is only 2 years old). Thankfully, the build for this beta was over six months old, which means there’s plenty of time left for optimization before the title’s full release in February.
Players who really enjoyed Monster Hunter World’s focus on environments and endemic life are going to absolutely be in love with Wilds’s approach to hunting zones, as the one map we’ve been shown so far is quite expansive. Of course, a lot of weapons received dodges or counters that evoke Monster Hunter Rise to me, so I felt very comfortable playing with a bow because it and dual blades basically have Adept dodge from Monster Hunter Generations where you can perfect dodge attacks should you have stamina.
Many other weapons have offset attacks, like how a hammer can deflect a monster attack and knock them down should you perfectly time an upswing to connect with the monster’s attack. Some weapons have clashes where you can slam your shield into the monster and knock them off of you if you perform certain attacks with the right timing. Then there’s insect glaive, which didn’t get anything but a control scheme you need three hands to properly play. Oh well.
All in all, it was a great time exploring the desert with my friends, trying out new weapons, seeing how they revamped my beloved bow yet again, experimenting with changes to long held mechanics and systems, as well as gathering monster parts from Rey Dau that are absolutely not going to transfer into the full game.
The Monster Hunter Wilds beta was obviously still very buggy, disconnections were rampant, and performance was all over the place, but for a six-month-old build of the game, that isn’t too terrible. Hopefully there’s a second beta before release so we can see just how much the title has improved over these last few months of fine tuning and optimization.
With that, I think we can bring this entry of Save State to a close. I still don’t understand why an anaconda wants buns, hon. Maybe they need gluten to live? The world may never know. See you in two weeks!