Wilds: Retrospective on Low Rank

Wilds is out! I was sick on release day, but I’ve since had a chance to play through low rank and the first part of the story. I still have a long ways to go, but this seems like as good a time as any to look back and collect some thoughts.

But first, please consider subscribing to this blog. This is a new adventure for me; I have a lot of Monster Hunter worms in my brain and I’m looking forward to expressing some of them here.

I’m also somewhat active on mastodon where I post monster hunter and game development stuff. My game dev blog is here: https://nuzcraft.substack.com. Finally, I try to cross post everything to my website https://nuzcraft.com and you can send me an email me[at]nuzcraft[dot]com if you like.

Spoilers Ahead!!

Overall, I have had a wonderful time in Wilds. I’m playing on PS5 and haven’t had any significant performance issues. I’m also pretty well divorced from any ongoing drama or leaks, which has helped me just dive in and experience a bunch of stuff for myself.

Difficulty is Too Easy

Okay, I have some minor qualms with the difficulty curve being too easy BUT I fully admit to being a veteran of the series. It seemed like there was a potential difficulty spike towards the end of low rank, but realistically I didn’t have any issues with any monsters using normal progression gear. My first cart was during the final boss of low rank; I don’t think that’s a testament to my skill as a hunter, more an artifact of the difficulty curve with fewer really punishing situations.

The Monsters are Great

There are SO many cool monsters in this game! Most of them are original designs as well, which makes it really fun to explore the fights and learn the weapon I was using against them.

FOR REAL, SPOILERS AHEAD

From the lead up marketing, I was aware of most of the monsters in the game, but there were a few that were complete suprises to me. I cut back from watching any marketing or trailers a couple months ahead of release to try to maintain some surprises, and I was surprised! My favorite surprise monster was Xu Wu, a samurai octopus mushroom monster. So cool! I was super stoked to see more than one octopus monster!

I had a great time with a bunch of other monster moments as well: Jin Dahaad was an epic fight, Arkveld was the toughest battle, figuring out that you can slinger the wylk with elemental pods to damage guardian monsters was EPIC, and finally, Zoh Shia was really really cool.

The Environments are fun to explore

One of the criticisms I had of Monster Hunter Rise was that even with wirebugs and verticality, you still kinda just rode the dog on the lower paths and the monsters never really gave you a reason to explore the map. Wilds enables some similar behavior with the seikrets, but they make up for it by making pretty much every part of the map equally important. Even if you auto-pursue on the bird, you’ll find it taking interesting shortcuts or navigating new areas that you can stop and explore at your leisure. I’m ~20 hours into the game, taking my time, and I don’t know my way around the environments yet; there is so much to explore. Low rank hasn’t required much gathering, but it’s feeling like I’ll need to do more independent exploration in high rank to find good sources of trap materials and such.

GUNLANCE 🚀

I started my game intending to primarily use the dual blades, and did for a while, but my secondary, the gunlance, really took hold about mid-way through. I’ve always enjoyed GL, but I seemed to find a good rhythm in this game being able to focus on shelling, wyvern stake, and guarding. Most of the GLs I used happened to be wide shelling, so leveraging the big wyvern blasts is great. The ‘drill baby drill’ focus attack is very cool as well, though sometimes hard to aim. I’m hoping to find some good normal and long shelling options in high rank to see how it feels leveraging full burst and charged shelling combos to greater effect.

Conclusions?

1. MH Wilds is great
2. Game too easy
3. Monsters are cool
4. Environments are Great
5. Gunlance is Great

I plan on returning with an update after high rank? We’ll see if some of these ideas hold up as monster get tougher and the game continues to progress.

-nuzcraft