At Gamescom, the developers of Monster Hunter Wilds have been hosting daily, hours-long livestreams , featuring lengthy gameplay demos of devs hunting in real time. With hours of new mechanics and features on display, this is basically a public holiday for Monster Hunter veterans—a beautiful cohort of beings with deeply addled brains, who love nothing more than to pick apart the implications for the next era of hunts. After poring feverishly over the livestream footage and accompanying fanbase frenzy, here are a few of the features—new and returning, big and small—that I'm thrilled to see in Monster Hunter Wilds.
1. Stronger dung Making use of every possible tool is one of the hunter's most important skills, and dung is no exception. In the ferocious ecology of Monster Hunter Wilds, large monsters can move as herds of hostile behemoths.
Luckily, the humble Dung Pod (usually used to shoo away an unwelcome monster from the area) has gotten an upgrade to ensure that resourceful hunters don't end up outmatched. With a tactically-deployed stench cloud from a Large Dung Pod, the Monster Hunter devs sent whole packs of large monsters scattering at once so they could tackle their preferred target without getting overwhelmed. What excites me about bigger dung—you can get paid while writing all kinds of sentences, it turns out—is that it'll let me test my mettle and see if I can battle a whole herd of monsters at once.
If I can, excellent: I continue being very cool and stron.