‘Even more vicious and threatening than before’: the fantastical creatures of Monster Hunter Wilds

The minds behind the forthcoming Monster Hunter Wilds talk about creating a world of extremes for players to explore

Out in the desert, the skies begin to darken. You’re here to hunt the Doshagama, a kind of scaly lion with a squashed face that roams the dunes in small packs, an intimidating beast. But the incoming storm suggests that something bigger is on the way. Before long a giant silhouette descends from the heavens: the Rey Dau, a horned, gold-fringed dragon that commands the lightning. Are you strong enough to face it? Or is it time to run for the hills?

Monster Hunter is one of Capcom’s most successful game series – though it was not always thus. When I started playing it, in 2006 on the PlayStation Portable, almost nobody else was interested. It was fiddly, demanding, famously difficult, and online play didn’t work well. In Japan, meanwhile, when I moved there in 2008, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing someone playing Monster Hunter on a train or in a cafe. It was 2018’s Monster Hunter: World that truly turned the game into a global hit: technology had finally enabled the kind of expansive natural setting that did its huge, intimidating, eminently believable monsters justice – and frictionless online play was a reality.