Sawt Falasteen - 'Monster Hunter' on prowl for new audiences as latest game drops

It has been seven years since the last major instalment saw fans draw oversized swords and bows together, in a series whose success is built on cooperative play to take down dragons and other spectacularly-rendered creatures.

Co-op is "really the heart of the series and at the core of its DNA," said the game's director Yuya Tokuda.

Long queues to test the new instalment at conventions and mass participation in an online open test weekend in October have underscored the anticipation in recent months.

"Rather than feeling pressure... it's actually more of a useful chance for us to see the players' reactions and also get data about what it is we should be working on," Ryozo Tsujimoto, the series' 50-something longtime producer said during a trip to Europe weeks ahead of the release.

"Wilds" is the first "Monster Hunter" instalment built for latest-generation consoles.

Tsujimoto says this will allow for "even more seamless" play, highlighting that there will be no loading screens between players' base camp and the monster-haunted open world beyond.

Such changes "make you feel like you really are part of the ecosystem from start to finish every time you play the game," he said.

But even on more powerful machines, it was "really quite difficult" to populate the environment with the huge numbers of monsters and other creatures that the developers wanted, Tsujimoto added.

There were "lots of programming challenges and also hardware challenges," he said.

- Stoking the hype -

The "Monster Hunter" series has shipped more than 108 million units since the first release on Playstation 2, making it a second tentpole franchise for Japanese publisher Capcom alongside the "Resident Evil" zombie saga.

It took time and several instalments for "Monster Hunter" to win popularity outside Japan itself.

Back then, "we didn't really have a development schedule... set up for simultaneous localised release around the world," Tsujimoto remembers.

That meant delays of up to a year for different language versions to be adapted, undermining the hype around new releases beyond the home market.

"All the news about what was going to be in the game, which monsters and features, had already come out globally, players felt like they'd seen it all from looking online," Tsujimoto said.

These days releases are synchronised around the world to strike while the anticipation is at its peak.

- Broadening reach -

"Monster Hunter" has also benefited from vastly more players able to join in online with high-quality connections.

"Breaking down each of those barriers... is what finally brought us out of niche status in the West and into a global blockbuster," Tsujimoto said.

Nevertheless, "there are still people out there who don't know about 'Monster Hunter'," he added.

It was up to the studio to "try and find new ways to make sure that the 'Monster Hunter' name spreads among as large an audience around the world as possible".

A first film set in the universe of the games, released in 2020, was a relative flop.

That hasn't put off Tsujimoto, who says "image licensing" is "something we're aways considering as being on the table".

Although naming no plans for the immediate future, the producer is "always thinking of ways to expand the series around the world", including to "people who don't play games", he said.

Tsujimoto and Tokuda did not comment on whether "Wilds" would be available for Nintendo's hotly-anticipated Switch 2 console, set for release later this year.

But looking to the future, "we do still have plenty of monster ideas up our sleeves," Tokuda said.

L.AbuTayeh--SF-PST