Monster Hunter Wilds Needs One Feature to Be a Game-Changer at Launch

Summer 2024 is closing in, and with it comes the promise of more Monster Hunter Wilds news. Announced in December 2023 through a gameplay teaser, Monster Hunter Wilds caused a large stir in the MH community. Fans flocked back to Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise, both of which had wrapped their post-launch support, and even propelled Monster Hunter World to new sales milestones in the process. Love for Monster Hunter is still going strong after its fifth generation made it a global hit, and Wilds is set to keep the hot streak going.

Monster Hunter Wilds’ summer news update is the next step in that process, though it’s not just the IP’s strength that has fans anticipating it. The game’s reveal trailer hinted at a lot of new features, but didn’t confirm or contextualize anything for sure. Wilds’ new mount is probably replacing MH Rise’s Palamutes, but what they do differently isn’t clear yet. Raised monster density, weather effects, and a wider play space were also teased, but it’s unknown how this will affect Monster Hunter‘s consistent gameplay loop. Capcom will likely focus on that in MH Wilds’ next showing, but it should also confirm a fan-requested feature on the way.

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Monster Hunter Has Yet To Add Cross-Platform Multiplayer

Back in late 2021, Capcom released a Monster Hunter survey, meant to gather feedback for the upcoming Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak expansion. It included prominent questions about implementing cross-play and cross-saves between MH Rise’s Switch and PC versions, something fans were enthusiastic about as expected. Unfortunately, it only took a couple of weeks for Capcom to retract this, with a social media post explaining that staff had looked into adding cross-play to Monster Hunter throughout Rise‘s development and found it couldn’t be implemented at the moment. Monster Hunter Rise eventually spread to all contemporary platforms, but hopes for any kind of cross-platform support were crushed.

Capcom ID Gives Monster Hunter Wilds A Road Into Cross-Play

Why this decision was made has not been revealed, but the wording implied that Capcom did have these features in mind during Rise‘s development, and something didn’t work out. Modern Capcom fans may have an inkling of what that was, now that Resident Evil Re:Verse, Street Fighter 6, and Exoprimal have incorporated Capcom ID. All three are recent Capcom titles running on the RE Engine, which Monster Hunter also uses, and support cross-platform multiplayer. Exoprimal needed to reach its fourth season for comprehensive cross-platform squad multiplayer like players wanted, but it got there, and that means good things for Monster Hunter Wilds.

Monster Hunter Wilds Is Perfectly Suited For Cross-Play

After both Monster Hunter World and Rise missed out on cross-play, Wilds getting it is a big deal. Cooperative multiplayer is one of the foundational pillars of the Monster Hunter franchise, but the series has been slow to adapt to its fifth generation games launching on multiple skews that needed extra legwork to play together. Going into the sixth generation, Monster Hunter Wilds can finally allow friend groups using different platforms to group up and hunt together at their leisure, restoring one of its main strengths to its former glory.

Cross-Progression Would Also Be A Big Deal For Monster Hunter Wilds

This would require every Monster Hunter Wilds player to sign up with a Capcom ID to go online at all, but Capcom could sweeten this deal with another feature. Cross-progression, referring to save data being tied to an account rather than a game’s hardware, has yet to be implemented in a Capcom ID title. As Monster Hunter is one of Capcom’s biggest money-makers, Wilds would be the perfect place to introduce cross-saves to the Capcom ID ecosystem. The feedback gathered from Monster Hunter Wilds’ plentiful players could be invaluable to Capcom games going forward, so it needs to make sure its cross-platform features are ready at launch.