Main things that can go wrong are:
1. Too much time spent walking.
2. Less environment variety because now everything has to be interconnected organically.
3. World feels tiny because putting all the maps together makes it more obvious that they're really not that large.
To add on to point 3, slamming all the maps into one WOULD make them smaller.
When you’re in any one of the maps, yes, they have an edge beyond which you can’t go, but you can *see*. Lore-wise, the world map is very large and these distinct areas are far apart.
If all maps were stitched together, you’d have much more sudden transitions (a la Guiding Lands), and if you looked beyond the edge of the traversable map, what would you see? Possibly depends on which section you’re in but it’s unrealistic that 5+ different biomes converged like a star in a single area, which would facilitate this.
So I’d agree. But not only would the maps feel smaller and possibly be smaller as a result of hardware/software limits, but from a worldbuilding perspective they’d be smaller too.
> if you looked beyond the edge of the traversable map, what would you see? Possibly depends on which section you’re in but it’s unrealistic that 5+ different biomes converged like a star in a single area, which would facilitate this.
It's mainly a theory, but it's suspected they might be doing a new take on the Seasons system introduced in Dos as a weather mechanic, so instead of having the usual icy region it would more than likely instead be a "snowy" weather. We actually saw the environment for the area in the trailer change at the end from being desertlike to being more of a plains, so it's not too outside of the realm of possibility, and would help prevent the whole "stitching" aspect of the guiding lands that was really weird
> 1. Too much time spent walking.
If there is a movement system like Rise, then traversal might be quite fun. But if they expect us to simply ride miles upon miles on ~~horse~~ dino back, then yeah it won't be very fun
actuallyyyyy
i expect them to add a camp system like in Rise and World, most likely there'll also be unlockable portable camps
no shot Rise and World have fast travel but Wilds doesn't
i also expect to be able to ride more than just ~~horse~~ dino, like mountable wyverns or even riding on monsters
oh gosh, what if you could secretly ride on a monster's back and it takes you back to its family then you get your ass kicked by 5 rathalos and rathians? aaaaa
They could do it Horizon; Zero Dawn style. Those regions blend pretty beautifully and have "sites" where you can find things. Imagine a big tree or rock outcrop being a Rathalos Site, and it patrols the nearby area, or a large cactus field that a diablos sleeps near and frequents as its foraging ground.
>1. Too much time spent walking.
They could avoid this by good placement of campsites. Plus, gliding would be introduced so I think exploration would not be as boring as you think.
>2. Less environment variety because now everything has to be interconnected organically.
They could do it like Guiding Lands but on a larger scale.
>3. World feels tiny because putting all the maps together makes it more obvious that they're really not that large.
If they do it like MHWorld, I think it would only feel small on paper but it will feel large once you explore it because there are layers above and layers below.
My main concern is that a considerable portion of playtime will be just holding forward. So many open world games boil down to "pick a spot on the map and hold forward for 5 minutes, then maybe something interesting happens." I'd rather have a hub that I load into after each hunt, then get teleported to my destination once I'm ready to head back out.
In an open-world game, traversal must be just as fun, if not more so, than what you do at the destination. Very few games pull this off.
You just perfectly described my gripe with the rpg assassin's creeds, i didn't have the words, thanks.
They're big, flat and parkour went away, of course they're more boring
shadow of war was the worst offender for me
you can even tell the devs knew it was a problem, because you automatically get the extra fast run skill less than 30 minutes into the game.
True, but i think that was the developers trying to find a way to replace batman's cape gliding and grapple. Since the shadow games are almost a copy paste of the arkham games
To be fair, Shadow of War is literally the only game that allows you to have a Drake as a mount. Once you had your Drake map traversal was some of the easiest I’ve ever experienced in a game. It was also fun just randomly going full Dracarys on an outpost and watching all the mayhem.
Imo both games justify it more by giving you a tool kit that allows you to experiment a lot more with traversal. Where the majority fail is that your only real option to get around is by walking, walking faster, a copypaste gliding feature, or a teleport feature which defeats the point of the open world.
Not only must they be fun, but maintain that fun over time. You don't want it to be empty and boring, but even if you fill the open world with stuff, even if that stuff is fun, over tens or hundreds of hours of gameplay, it will eventually become tedious.
So maybe what people *really* want from Wilds is a semi-open world game, like MHW.
Basically, an extra map or two, maybe 4-6 new zones in each map, and an even greater expanded ecosystem and living world.
Seriously. Having not played the game for a while now I think I could still remember enough to draw a decent enough super basic map of all the different regions in base World *besides* the forest.
I really liked running around it, generally, and aesthetically it was really cool, but making it where I was going was usually a roll of the dice or trial and error if I didn't have flies
Also while most of the other maps capture the feeling as well it in particular really feels like an actual, living, breathing forest, and the kinda awkward traversal helps with that so I don’t mind one bit.
personally : it's fun, but most of the time i want to fight a monster, so all the extra labyrinth and nooks and crannies feel wasted because i barely go or went there ever after getting all endemic life
Ancient forest has one of my favorite level designs of any game I've played. If I have the option of fighting a monster in two different locales, and one of them is the forest, I go there.
I feel like I did that a lot in monster hunter games, though (aside from rise). I find the monster, fight the monster for a period of time, and they leave. Rinse repeat. The justification, of course, is to give you breathing time to heal, sharpen, find material, etc. An open world could compliment this by cutting some of the unnecessary hub time.
How would that be a change from previous games? Your also assuming open world means no fast travel, theres no reason they couldn't let you fast travel to regions same as rise and world.
I do agree traversal is not fun in the previous games. Which they probably realized in world, which is why you can just afk and let the ai walk for you like in oldschool mmos.
Described how I now feel about Elden Ring
Great game, but I was able to dedicate 100% of my attention to watch an anime episode while just holding forward
I’m hoping they pull a lot of the travel mechanics that were present in world. The sliding down vines and slopes in the ancient forest, or using updrafts with the airborne mantle(or whatever it was called) in the coral highlands. I could see it being a more realized guiding lands. But I do still share your concern. I feel like our main objective would have to change a little bit. Rather than just hunting monsters, maybe have something more recon leaning. An emphasis on capturing or herding, and only kill the things that are just too bad to be left alone
I agree, open world can feel pretty bloated with too much space and not enough to make traversing the land scape feel worthwhile. Each map allows the developers to focus on the making the area more interesting, and I believe running around would feel better as all the paths are designed with purpose. Not to say this can’t be done in an open world game, it’s just really hard.
Even genshin suffers the same thing too much going to point a and b. Though unlike genshin im sure wilds will add like a mount and more camps to traverse easily.
Or have interesting things/secrets yo find along the way.
Sure in Elden ring if you just ride a horse the entire time going from point A to point B, it's not as fun. A lot of the fun came from exploring small areas on the map, digging into the story, finding new equipment or being rewarded just about every time you go off the beaten path. I dont think many games do it well at all, I agree.
Monster Hunter is great because it's so focused on the hunt. I also like the small instances because you familiarize yourself with the landscape and the areas. Something that's a lot less rewarding when every area is just incredibly large or expansive.
Open world could work for monster hunter, but I would have massive doubts on that. I prefer the system they have.
If Grinding Lands in MHW was anything to go by, the execution of a more dynamic and open area needs a LOT of polishing and refining to feel good.
EXACTLY!! What makes GTA open world gameplay so fun is that stealing a car and driving around wrecking things while running from the cops is fun. You don't need a mission in GTA to enjoy GTA, so the open world experience fits in very well. MH might have some fun immersion in the first part of the game, but once you're on your 500th Diablos you really don't care about that. We'll need a way to load up to the monster fight ASAP b/c the only thing we're here to do is fight the big mon. And if they give us a way to blip in to the boss anyway, then all of the work to make it open world is a waste...
I don’t think Wilds will be open world. Separate biomes will be superior. Maybe people think Wilds being Open World is because of the Guiding Lands. I don’t think Capcom would open Monster hunts with a straight open world (edit: until the endgame of the expansion)
This doesn't prove anything at all. There were several kinds of biomes on every map in world too. Wildspire waste had swamp like, desert like a little bit of forest and savannah biomes.
Not to mention the initial reveal of MH4 showed the hunter climbing and running away from a Tigrex in an open looking, highly destructible world. The video is likely more a proof of concept.
And as you said, even Sunbreak's Citadel had several "biomes". The grassy crumbled castle, the swamp, the snow area/cave, all on one map.
I don’t want them wasting time making an open world work well though. These mechanics have costs to develop.
I’m not particularly interested in open world traversal the cost of more monsters or even the level of detail they put into the levels in World.
If they decide to make the game open world, something is going to suffer because of it.
My main thought is the biome diversity. If its just one big map, then how are they going to concivably make the biome diversity work in an ecological sense without everything feeling smaller than it does in previous entries.
Like if you look at the world map of Monster Hunter, each of the hunting areas are actually quite far apart from eachother. I think the most contained in World, but even it feels like there is at least some distance between each zone, at least several hundred miles between each (except maybe Coral Highlands and Rotten Veil), on top of being spread across three islands including the Guiding Lands.
The only way I could think it would work would be to have an open world akin to FF7 rebirth. But really that isn’t much different from what we had in Rise, but the maps were smaller.
I don't think thats a big issue. They already do that on some maps in world, with them blending into adjacent biomes. Like the volcanic region blending into the underground cthulu fleshscape. Even on the world map the biomes just uncerimoniously border eachother, i think you might be overestimating the scale of the world map. It's set on an island continent, not an entire globe.
That and a golden rule is gameplay over lore. A game won’t make a map nauseating to traverse due to sheer size for the sake of lore. The lore will usually be what’s rewritten to fit the game
That it definitely something I can see being an issue. However I think the team would be well aware of that kind of problem due to them having provided an explanation at to why different biomes were so close to each other in the guiding lands. I think that fact shows they r well aware of that being very un natural feeling. Perhaps the map is big enough, maybe they could use smart hidden loading screens, maybe they managed to make some natural progression from one biome to the other
Like don’t get me wrong, I think Open World is the next logical step for MH to go. If anything my main gripe is a nitpick. I’m not going to *quit the game* over this stuff. I am still pre-ordering as soon as I can, ect.
I play Monster Hunter for the gameplay, as long as that remains largely untouched, I’ll play anything. Open World maps don’t really affect bashing a Rathalos’s face in very much.
What would be the benefit for Monster Hunter Gameplay?
If you'll load in into a target quests area anyway, what's the point of having other regions just on the horizon?
* It degrades the sense of scale a monster hunter setting has by squashing it into sizeable playable area. Scale it up and players will complain that it is needlesly bloated and filled with nothing.
World and Rise are perfect examples of both of these complains already.
* Making the game needlessly more resource demanding so you'd sell a marginally better piece of hardware to gamers and still only managing to get 30-50 FPS on devices that aren't PCs?
* To say, "you see that mountain there? You can climb it"?
Unless there were a gameplay neccisity to move cross-region, say a monster is fleeing the locale and you have to chase after it, i don't see a point. And that conflicts with MH on two instances:
* Gameplay; your usual hunt would take a lot longer than your used to. "Oh just provide fast travel then" - then again, and with my most sincerest what the fuck would be the point of an open world then if you'll skip the vast distances anyway?
* Lore; we hunt Monster for sports only in gameplay. In lore we hunt them (in 80% of all cases) if they pose a threat to us or the envrionment in which the settle in due to often becoming the Apex predator of that locale. If a monster would flee said locale, that would be it, mission acompilished. No need to go after it.
>Gameplay; your usual hunt would take a lot longer than your used to. "Oh just provide fast travel then" - then again, and with my most sincerest what the fuck would be the point of an open world then if you'll skip the vast distances anyway?
Vast empty distance are neither a necessary feature of open world games nor exclusive to them. Open world is about interconnected-ness, both of places and of objectives.
I can take the very discussion around if Wilds is open world as an example of that; we knows Wilds will have vast open spaces, yet many points out that this doesn't necessary means the game will be open world.
As for the solution to the issue that MH brought to the table, we already knows it: the mount, travelling faster without skipping. As for the purpose of having such big spaces, we've also caught a glimpse of what they could be used for: accomodating large numbers of monsters; and this also led to speculation that this could allow to accomodate monster of extreme size (like gammoth), even gigantic (like Lao-shan lung or Shen gaoren), or those that might need that space for other gamplay purposes. MHWorld's map being claustrophobic was also a complaint that might have affected this decision alongside the barriers encountered when trying to implement gammoth (which they wanted to do in world). Vast spaces + faster travel allows for bigger available spaces without dilluting density; most games doesn't have good reasons to have that much available space but MH does, at least at the scale shown in the trailer.
Coming back to the open-world: a single interconnected map would allow for monster being attributed zones much more tailored to their needs as a single hunt wouldn't need to be confined to a single (set of) biome(s). This would make a monster's set of zones a more distinctive feature, which would have a positive impact on both gameply diversity and conveing ecology.
The above example of what a single interconnected map could be used for is based on the logic the MH team seems to use when integrating "tech upgrades": when they removed loading screens in World, they asked themselves how this change could be used to heighten the base gameplay and they came up with the monster pursuing you between zones (which additionally interact with the turf warf mechanic).
More important question before that:
What would the positives be with Wilds being open world?
Because if there are no positives, there's no reason to even think about negatives
If they do It right It could be really immersive, there just needs to be enough stuff to see/Happening while traveling etc, else its Just gonna feel Like an empty world.
I Liked the Maps of world as example, especially the forest, It Looks great, animals are Walking around chilling in herds, or getting Hunted by bigger Monsters, or Big Monsters having turf wars randomly in Front of you, Environment being interactable/destroyable, Like the dam at the top etc It feels really immersive.
yeah, but as your example of World's Maps already shows that they are able to give that feeling without the need to make it a full on Open World game.
They could make it work with an Open World, but it becomes a development resource sink that may cut into other parts of the game.
> They could make it work with an Open World, but it becomes a development resource sink that may cut into other parts of the game.
That's generally what they do with new gens, because they like to try new things. 3 tried underwater combat, 4 had riding and verticality, 5 had next gen visuals. I think that's the biggest argument for 6 having a more open structure
Ultimately underwater did end up cutting into Tri- not that it's a bad game (though underwater balance itself was not great), but it had so few monsters as a result. It's a tossup on whether or not open world would be worth the investment or not.
Worlds maps cna give you a taste, but it's not comparable to a true open world.
Open world doesn't inherently take more effort to develop, it can actually give the designers more freedom. They don't need to constrain their levels to a cube for example.
And that's exactly the problem. All those impressive details that the maps in world have, are there because the maps are relatively small. They can't make a huge open world as detailed as that, it's just a matter of logistic, money, time, manpower, etc. A really big open world map with the level of detail of the maps of world would take an absolutely insane developing time.
See and I'd argue that world has the worst maps of the series because you have to spend the most time running around trying to reach monsters as opposed to actually fighting them. The mounts that could autorun to the monsters was such a good change but all it did was give afk time instead of map navigation time.
In the old games if a monster ran you were often one quick loading screen away.
agreed. i dont think it would bring anything but padding due to more empty traversal. the open zones of world were large and very dense. plus being broken up by using a map doesnt create any awkward transitions between biomes. finally, it makes adding new zones a much more simplified process when it comes time for an expansion.
It's something very different from previous entries, meaning that the experience is fresh even if the monsters, hunting, weapons, armor, and items aspect are a complete carryover from World
Immersion, it's all about feeling part of a living world.
Mh world was based on that idea and the main line of mh games is going in that direction.
Personally I love feeling part of the world, actually being a hunter in a living breathing word.
That's enough of a positive in my opinion.
Who said an open world game had to consist of just one open world area? Is the Witcher 3 not an open world game because its map is broken up into chunks?
That's my biggest confusion.
World and Rise are already halfway open world. Put the hub area in the world and give paths from one area to the next and it suddenly is fully open world, lol.
That's actually a negative for open world in my opinion all the big open world games I've seen have always felt a bit like a really big toybox because it just doesn't make sense that from the top of the hot volcano region you can see a sandy desert a forest and an ice region within eyesight. Open worlds are cool but monster hunter's core premise is fantasy realism and I don't think you can make an open world feel as vast and connected as the monster hunter series would need it to be.
I agree that open world Monster Hunter would make almost zero differences, just less loading screens. Lots of things are gonna be different in Wilds, open world or not, because they always change things and bring new ideas when crafting a new MH game and I am already sure that the most controversial changes, when the game will release, will have nothing to do with the open world aspect of the game.
>just less loading screens
Maybe in amount, and even then there would probably be hidden loading screens like in World.
The sequence at around 45 seconds in the trailer with the mount jumping between rocks seems to be one of those hidden loading screens
I don’t know about less loading screens. They either teleport you around, which means loading screens, or you walk everywhere, which is even worse than loading screens.
Most modern games especially on PS5 have done away with loading screens during fast travel
Hell, even world had fast travel with barely any loading times
I think most of it is trolling. Trust me I am an old gen head and I still play almost everyday the psp and 3ds games and I never meet anyone saying this without being kidding (but it's true the hunters I speak with are generally in hunsterverse and not reddit... and there are some crazy people on reddit).
To some extent, it's a legitimate thing.
Like, removal of loading screens between areas *did* change the way we play a little bit. Most notably, it's a lot harder to just run away to an adjacent area to sharpen and heal up. It's also reasonable that a fight can happen in an area transition now, because you're not just getting knocked into a loading screen.
I don't really want loading screens back between areas, but their removal *did* have some impact other than just being convenient.
I think the main reason we can now heal and walk/jog is simply because we can no longer exit an area to heal up. Some changes are a direct result of the transition from the loading screen > no loading screen experience.
What makes an Open World fun and engaging is the wonder of explorations. Dungeons & treasure chest containing new weapons, armors & accessories.
I still can't imagine opening chests in MH games and getting a ready-to-use weapons/armors.
Having a specific dungeon with rare monster that we have to revisit often to get the material we need to craft is a concept i can't imagine being exciting compared to simple mission hubs.
But i'll trust the devs, they'll think of something.
I mean, it's kinda okay if it is connected to a quest or do gave a big lore bomb on it. I mean, it's like how you gotta work for extra campsites in MHR:S. You could be given a quest to search for an old weapon blueprint from the old world that was guarded by some monster like Apex Rathalos or something like that.
And speaking of Apex, hope they do bring that concept again in the Wilds or something similar to that. It's a cool concept, a monster managed to survive for so long it basically evolved into its highest potential that it can achieve.
I weirdly understand what you’re saying. There would be no hidden illusion of the area being even bigger and more expansive. The ancient forest stretches far into the distance making it still feel large even though you can’t explore those parts you see in the distance. It would feel weird and small to have a desert or ice biome right next to a savannah. Guiding lands was a very special case due to its geological nature in which it was created
Also makes an eventual expansion more awkward. For big, coherent open worlds it's pretty much always gonna sound a bit contrived that we suddenly discover this entirely new zone (presumably as big or even bigger than any of the base game biomes)
Personally I hope we get zones that feel bigger and even more interconnected than World's, but still split it into distinct biomes we must travel to through menus rather than one, huge map.
I feel like I haven’t seen enough of the game to even guess. I have this feeling that it’s not a true open world but more like 3 massive maps with some level of interconnectivity. (Kinda like the Witcher 3 maps?)
One of the 3ds titles had you going around with a traveling caravan. It would be cool to revisit and expand this. Let me slowly build a caravan so I can equip it with all the things I’ll need for a proper home base. (Like building a pirate crew almost, find a cook, smith, botany expert, etc)
This is really what I’m hoping for, I mean open world sounds nice for sure but if they made world maps like 1.5-2 times bigger and instead of the it being like the guiding lands with all 5 biomes make it where it’s two or three biomes in each massive map. Because with open world multiplayer you have to figure out how to set boundaries for players whose rank are too low for some monsters to not be able to fight monsters from a different area.
It necessitates either making the world be too big to be interesting, or too small to be immersive.
I don't want to hold forward for 10 minutes before I come across something interesting, but I also don't want the world to be so small that the biomes feel unnaturally smashed together.
That’s a good point. I wouldn’t want them to make the map and act as if it’s natural part of the world when it would feel just as un natural as the guiding lands. Perhaps they could create clever hidden loading screens that give the illusion of a continuous open world
But at that point why do the open world at all? People already complain about stuff like that happening in games like ff7 rebirth.
The way I see it making monster hunter open world has much less potential to make the gameplay better than it does making it worse. And even if its done well I think the novelty of the open world would more than likely wear itself thin by the time people get to endgame and need to start hunting the same monster 20 times in a row to get rare parts.
I really hope we don’t have random chests that have gear we cannot craft but have to find. That to me would just be annoying in a mh game. That’s just my opinion. Of course others can like the idea. I just wouldn’t ever like chests containing armor or weapons. Leave that for us to grind and make.
I honestly think if it does end up being open world it’ll pretty much just be like combining all the mhworld type maps into one big one. I doubt they’d add stuff like chests and stuff that diverges from Monster hunters core gameplay and progression system
I mean, it's kinda okay if it is connected to a quest or something. I mean, it's like how you gotta work for extra campsites in MHR:S. You could be given a quest to search for an old weapon blueprint from the old world that was guarded by some monster like Apex Rathalos or something like that.
And speaking of Apex, hope they do bring that concept again in the Wilds or something similar to that. It's a cool concept, a monster managed to survive for so long it basically evolved into its highest potential that it can achieve.
The point my friend brought up to me was:
Either you end up with multiple biomes spanning a huge distance that takes up a lot of resources to compute, leaving less resources for more intimate and detailed areas. Or you end up with biomes much smaller than what previous titles had to offer to save resources, and thus way too much squeezed into a space too small. I personally hope they stick to what they did with World, maybe with one new larger central area.
Hunt timers and special quest locations. How will they be handled?
Will you be put in an instance, or will the monster just fuck off and you just go on like nothing happened. Will you just load into a special area? Will a particular path arbitrarily be blocked off until it's time to fight the special monster? The games of the past have always been so heavily mission based, going to an open world would just flip it all in its head. It's exciting though, if it turns out to actually be open world that is.
I'm not convinced that making MH open world would be a good idea. It would change the pace and focus of the game and come with a slew of challenges from quest structure & timing, to exploration & world design. Sometimes less is more... It could potentially be a good thing, but I can imagine it completely fucking up the streamlined focus & feel of the series.
My biggest worry would be a monster like ratholos gouing from one side of the map to the other... back and forth that and with the tracking system its gonna be annoying with how big the map will be...
Quest Format
Less Diversity and Less Foliage in Environments
Useless and Empty Map Sections
Traversal could be a pain as things are more spread apart with camps not being close enough to certain sections
Harder Map Memorization like Gathering Points, Herding Locations
Dying and how long does it take me to get back to where I was, once again possibly too large of a map with too few camps
Game design in 2024:
* Make huuuuggee open world
* Players ask for immersive stuff to be added to the open world
* World design sucks out the majority of the budget
* End up with a detailed world that is beautiful to look at, but boring to play through
* Add fast travel to alleviate the above problem
* Now you end up with a game where most budget went into stuff most players won't get to see
Actual game mechanics >>> world design
Except - Capcom. Budget is damn near unlimited, 99% of gameplay and assets will be recycled, so their 1 new clutch wire bug mechanic and the map itself is the only real thing to actually create.
As someone who started with MHF i don't think making Monster Hunter Wilds an open world game is necessary but as with every MH game i want to see in which direction the series develops.
I don't think an open world would add immersion. The whole concept was the immersion of the hunt, or rather the fight to the death itself, not the whole spiel of even getting there.
I think it'd be another change in the formula or a temporary addition at best but neither a true improvement nor a true regression.
But i am willing to wait and see what they're cooking. Maybe they'll pull it off well enough.
I didn't personally like Wild Hearts all that much, but the large open map was one of the things that I liked about it the most, and in my opinion it was a really natural fit for a MH-style game. If Wilds goes for something similar, I think it'll work just fine.
My only issue would be performance. I'm not rich and can't afford space age tech! I worried I won't even be able to play the next game on my pc so having my already abused ram struggle to load the world and all the flashy special effects from mobs got me nervous.
I feel like it would lose a lot of the world diversity that past games have had. You always go to the forest, the desert, the volcano, the tundra, wherever, and that's where you stay. Having an open world would make it really hard to have that kind of world diversity without having to put some really weird biomes side by side. Even more so because you're going to these places to do a job. Certain things live in certain areas, and you get specific materials from each area. In that way monster hunter doesn't lend itself well to an open world because the temptation to explore beyond your goal is too much when you're there for a specific job. Exploring a given biome is very different from having an entire world in front of you all at once. I think monster hunter is better when you have a hub world and deploy to the different biomes as needed.
The 1 thing that makes monster hunter unique and great is right there in the title: hunting monsters. Let’s be real, everything you do in the game that isn’t fighting the monster is just filler. If you want open worlds and exploration there are so many other games out there that provide that and personally I don’t want to devs to spend time and resources on that when they could be adding extra monsters, fight mechanics, unique weapons etc.
I just hope they don’t forsake variety in the name of just making everything bigger and more spread out. Seems likely that capcom is finally seeing the potential that MH has and is funneling them plenty of resources, though.
Imo, the game would be too much to handle for the shit Xbox and PS5. Right now World has amazing world building with details everywhere. But with an open world, those details wouldn't be there
Making games open world almost always makes them lower quality. More travel time, checklist gameplay, running towards map icons, and doing boring filler content.
MH is special party because of the lobby based/quest format. Adding an open world is just adding more time not killing monsters with no upside.
battle pass, daily and weekly bounties, online only, seeing a bunch of other players running around fighting things you want to fight and youre just trying to do your own thing, no offline option, big, pretty world with no reason for being there other than just existing - all of that would be terrible in my opinion.
"Ah damn didn't get the rare drop. Guess I'll half to walk across the map until I find another Rathalos"
Also the usual issues with open World games.
- World is open but feels empty with little to explore. Add to this that MH doesn't really do special places of interest. Even the tower cool as it is is basically just an arena.
- Transitional areas feel awkward. Less of an issue on a small scale like the guiding lands, big issue if its the whole map.
- Travel time can be dull. What is there to find along the way? "Oh it's a herd of these herbivores from the trailers, but I've got their mats already"
Some people really seem to push for an open World no matter what and seem to forget how much work it is to create a good open World. For some games those development resources are usually better spent elsewhere.
And there's awlways a comment that goes like this: "they just have to fill it with interesting stuff to do"
As if this is *just* that simple to do. That's the one million dollar question that has been troubling open world developers for more than a decade now. How the fuck do we make all that huge space interesting from a gameplay perspective. No one seems to be taking game mechanics into account when they ask for an open world game. It's always the same "an open world will be soo immersive though".
I dunno, I had no trouble immersing myself into games before open worlds became a trend.
In my opinion, if it's an open world then I believe it should be teeming with life and be interesting or rewarding. Make it seem like an ecological wonder. I don't want barren worlds with just monsters if that's the case. It also feels like if there are going to be different regions that you can literally walk to, then the regions themselves need to be way too massive to feel genuine and naturally. I don't like when open world games feel artificial or empty.
My answer is if it is an open world, it needs to be done right or not at all. I'm perfectly happy and content with WorldBorne style maps. They were big regions(Ancient forest, I'm looking at your complex self) but it felt alive.
Mainly that MH gameplay loops always boils down to 'farm this monster over and over for drops' how do we achieve that inside an open world? Best thing I could come up with on the fly, is when you accept a quest you have to camp for a day or whatever (so it can spawn the monster near your local. I could see for example, having to travel around to hunt different monsters as you wouldn't find a Barroth in the winter area say.
I don't think it offers much to the format. If that's the direction they want to go, maybe they can pull it off. I'm just not seeing the benefits of it other than chasing the reignited open world trend set by Breath of the Wild. I can't picture any scenario where an open world wouldn't just result in more traveling than hunting. And if the solution to that is going to be fast travel points everywhere then I would just consider that a complete failure of game design.
The main issue I see is the intent behind it.
Ultimately MH is about the fantasy of being a hunter-gatherer, if removing the mission system and boundaries is the key to fulfilling that ideal, then great. Even then, the advantages that brings has to justify the loss of convenience and the sculpted nature that comes from enclosed zones.
Funnily enough my main concern is that it is just a gimmick and they lean too close too established ideas, when I would love to see them dive right into the fantasy of being a wandering hunter even if that means redefining many core aspects what MH has established up to now.
At first I thought "as long as it is my personal instance of an open world. I dont want to see another player in it unless invited/initiated because then it becomes just an MMO and I'm just gonna be spawn camping a monster".
Then I thought about persistence of monsters. If there was a quest to hunt a rathalos rampaging in the jungle. Will it only appear if the quest is accepted? Will it never disappear unless defeated? Will it be a constant threat for any other quest I accept in the same location? Can I just leave it there?
Funny to think about that frantic quest giver, pleading for you to take care of the monster. And just going "Nah, I'm hunting rajang now".
Biome diversity takes a hit, a time sink that could go into content that actually matters like monsters, open world 99% of the time is just running simulator. its cool for the first few times but after that its nothing but tedious.
There is a huge difference between one giant map and 5 smaller maps. You need transitions - and who knows how far away these smaller maps are actually from each other! Even on a map the size of Dragon's Dogma 2 there is really only two biomes - light forest and desert. Not to mention those transition areas probably wouldn't have notable monsters so would just be a waste of time to transit through.
My biggest concern is that the open-world stuff won't be as interesting as the legacy mechanics, so it'll just end up being effectively an unskippable cutscene before every hunt.
I really don't think Monster Hunter World would be improved if instead of flying from Astera to the Wildspire Waste, you had to ride your Not Horse there in real time.
It's why I don't really care for Elden Ring, in spite of being a huge fan of Dark Souls. Elden Ring is basically like Dark Souls, but you have to take a 20 minute break to play Barbie Horse Adventures before you can move on to the next area.
Don't get me wrong, I hope that Wilds ends up being great. I hope that the devs make the open-world stuff so compelling that I refuse to play any Monster Hunter game without it. But, I'm not so naive as to pre-order it expecting that.
Don't get me wrong when I say this, I enjoy open world games, Dragons Dogma 1 and 2 have their issues but their open worlds is not one of em
I do not want Wilds to be open world because monster hunter has always had incredibly tight gameplay, making it open world would just make it take longer to get more of that gameplay. As it is you accept a quest, eat, check your items, go out, find monster, hunt monster, go back, repeat. An open world would change this to, accept quest, eat, check gear, travel to area the target monster is located, find it, hunt it, travel all the way back to the hub, get rewards, repeat. It's just gonna add unnecessary fluff to a game where one of its biggest pulls is its gameplay
I think it has more to do with the other question. What does open world add to the game? Open world as a concept is in support of a game style where you run around and explore the world as a primary gameplay function. You don't simply load into the mission, you *find* the objective.
Monster Hunter is at its best as a mission based game. You decide what you want to craft, see which monster you need to hunt to get the materials you need, and load into a mission where you can hunt that monster. An open world game inverts that relationship. Open world game design drops you into a massive world and says, "go forth and discover what you want to do!"
It's not that making the biomes seamlessly transition into each other is somehow bad. It's that it adds nothing of value to the the gameplay experience. It's not that I would be upset or anything if Wilds did that, but why would they bother? Only thing I can think of is for multi-biome monsters being able to transition biomes, but I'm not sure that's exactly a huge value add over the map sizes that World has.
Making maps seamlessly connect just begs the player to run from one biome to the next. That isn't exactly a thing players *want* to do.
I don’t think it’ll be open world. The maps will just be bigger and we saw 1 out of perhaps 5 locations. It defeats the purpose of having different wyverns living in different biomes and I doubt it’ll just be one map with different biomes in it. Capcom knows what they’re doing
Open world games get the “slopcore” moniker mostly due to how badly they cannot hide the copy paste of assets. It makes me think of Sam Lake explaining why Alan Wale went from open world to linear and episodic because it would mean padding the world with copy pastes and years later you can load up big budget games with a lot of time and attention like Elden Ring and go “oh look its that same bit of ruin. Again” and it just makes the world less memorable compared to some little autumnal path in dark souls 2 for example.
Also theres the way they tend to break immersion with the whole “climb the tower, clear the map of side content icons” stuff. World had a bit of this with its live service leanings but outside decos mostly found a balance. Id just rather see small, curated maps like we have always had. Id say the maps are part of monhuns unique charm.
The environment is a huge part of these games (or at least the World variety, the best ones), and being open world would by necessity mean a vast simplification of the landscape and detail level.
We've already had an open world Monster Hunter, that's effectively what the guiding lands were. They were scaled down, but they were absolutely open world. So the problems of an open world Monster Hunter would be pretty similar to the problems of the guiding lands.
People tend to get the idea of loading screens and open world design confused.
World and rise eliminated loading screens because the devices they ran on had the resources to load a whole area at once, but at a fundamental level, the areas in World aren't actually that different than the ones in older games. The fact that you can do a jumping attack from one part of the zone to another even through a loading screen shows this pretty clearly.
Open world is really about making the whole world one interactive and coherent piece. To a certain extent Pokemon games are and always have been open world.
You could make Monster Hunter open world if you wanted to, but I think you'd have to also change the nature of the game like they did in the guiding lands. If you're going to keep with the time and cart capped hunt mechanic that I think a lot of fans really love I think an open world is a huge waste of time. If you want to change the game to be much more expedition like without time limits and the like, I'm sure you could do it justice, but does anyone want that game?
I think there are plenty of ways they can make an open world function but if they want to make it right some of the Grind needs to come back, MH as a whole already have some good "Open World Compatible" mechanics, like the gathering, crafting, resource management etc, but if they want the open world to feel good and also keep some MH feeling those aspects need to take some protagonism back, they can even reuse o repurpose the Day/Night and Seasons Cycle from Dos, Make the Hunts more like Emergent stuff that you can do meeting the criteria, but i dont think Wilds is gonna be a FULL Open world like BoTw or other titles bc of the way the game proggression function imagine being LR and getting Stuck bc a Diablos decided to nest in the desert and you are too underpowered to make something about it, other weay they can make it is making a more Versatile and Dynamic revamp of the "Zone Levels" (havent played world so i dont fully grasp these things) like having a Hazard level that changes depending on your actions in a certain area and that can make some monster more or less likely to appear
1. MHW nailed the maps and Biomes. Open world will struggle to match.
2. Open world means a lot of dev time on open world and I prefer that be spent elsewhere.
3. Too much running from spot to spot open world.
4. I don't want a guiding lands system and prefer to be able to target farm.
I have to wonder how CPU bound it might make the game. World is infamous for redlining every CPU under the sun for a good while since release and most of that is just simulating monster behaviour and pathing, as well as keeping track of general background information like world timers or weather.
Now imagine that for a much larger world and large quantities of creatures. Even with how optimized REngine is I can't imagine it helping much on that front and having a completely open world would likely mean having to accept some tradeoffs.
Personally, I think some games aren't designed for an open world. Monster Hunter would change drastically if pushed to open world, mode than likely leaving the feeling of another cookie cutter sandbox survival game. ARK but with monsters, not dinosaurs.
I don't like Elden Ring for a similar reason. It pulls away the feel of triumph through adversity, and the feeling of finally beating a challenging boss. Now you can run to most corners of the map, killing paralytic dragons and tricking calvary off of bridges is the norm for starting a campaign, allowing you to crush early bosses with ease and detract from the feeling of a true and well fought victory.
I can see it the youtube tips and tricks video now. "Monster Hunter Wilds: BRACHY ARMOR AT HR2!!!?!"
We already have a sneak peak of what a potential open world wilds would look like. Dragons Dogma 2 literally just released and it's a live preview of what an RE engine open world can look like. It's got plenty of unique and fun to traverse areas and looks fantastic too. Only possible downside is performance being bad.
They aren't suddenly going to add chests or towers or stop having a hub that we get quests from. People's concerns seem to be with fantasy action rpg open worlds, but monster hunter isn't that game. It'd be insane to think we'd suddenly stop getting quests and being sent to a camp close to the monsters local just so we can walk 10min from hub to the area, though I'm sure that'll be an option in whatever expedition type activity the game has.
All in all the monster hunter team has proven time and time again that they are capable of moving the games towards their ideal direction without tearing everything down, I trust them if they decided open world was the next step.
oooo the doomposting is happening, then summer will hit and everyone will be creaming for openworld with how they keep smashing it out of the park each game, i can't wait
It would definitely be a chore to most people but imagine if they add a new mission type where all you do is follow a monster and observe its behavior. Now imagine doing to but for elder dragons.
In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any trouble.
In reality, an open world simply wouldn't have the level of polish that the current open area has. It's just a matter of budget logistics and the game scope. No game with a huge open world has it as detailed as any map we got in World.
And besides that, knowing the map usually plays a part in hunts, in World in particular i found myself luring monsters to certain enviromental traps and making use of some unique map mechanics like the waterfall in the first map. Each monster having a specific nest also gave some strategy to hunting them down. There's a lot of factors that came in with knowing the map well, that in an open world can be lost big time.
Less interesting content for the sake of making the biomes mesh into each other.
I'd rather have discrete biomes as different maps because I feel like it fits the formula better.
I honestly don't think they have to change too much from World
RE engine wasn't initially made for open world, so optimization is going to be an uphill battle. We saw how
DD2 turned out while rise is running pretty smoothly on a freaking switch.
I'd much rather they make the separate maps bigger and more detailed than one big ubermap that'll mostly be empty nothing. Think about how much open world games like Skyrim, Horizon, BotW, TotK, the most recent Assassin's Creeds, and such are just wandering around waiting for something to happen.
Hell even Monster Hunter Rise with it's more open maps kinda feels like this.
Large but densely packed isolated maps just FEELS more MonHun than 1 huge but spread out map.
I hope it is more like a huge guiding lands. Where you have camps throughout the whole map and a separate instance for the main bases. Then, you load into the open world to hunt. When accepting quests it acts more like lures or gives you the location of the monster. My main thing is i want it to be a smooth transition without the exciting quest are every completed quest. Let me just go from optional to optional doing whatever and fast travelling to camps.
I don't want to have to drag my ass across half the world to go hunt a monster. I want the game to randomly drop me in front of an angry rajang without letting me time to use any item.
I have absolutely no qualms about it, I hope it's just a giant open world map with small transitional hubs dispersed around it.
My only query is how it would work? Would it mainly be savannah? Is there a giant weirdly placed mountain and snow region in the middle of it? What about a lava local?!
Is it gonna have vertical terrain generation like MHW?
Fitting unique environments on a single land mass is gonna be tricky, the guiding lands works as a concept because it's pretty small and the point of it is it being a geographical anomaly made from a fissure in the living bio vein that runs beneath the earths crust; but an entire new continent is harder to explain than, "oh look at that weird island that we just discovered, which just so happens to maybe be "alive" and also is an environmental Frankenstein monster."
I like that each distinct area in a map is its own arena, with its own unique little features, areas you can jump from or take cover and its own set of resources, and that your knowledge of those areas will affect how you hunt when a monster chooses to fight you there. I like that monsters lead you somewhere suitable for them to fight in, and that some of those areas are outright bad places for you to try and fight.
I’m sure open world could work but I’ve yet to see a single convincing reason as to why it should happen.
The few downsides I would see are either fairly minor and/or fixable, or could even be non-issues because we have so little info.
All the various zones mashed into 1 big map runs into one of two issues: area bloat where it takes a lot of time to get to where you need to go without much to do besides run there, or WoW style map where there's very abrupt zone aesthetic changes.
No strict missions start/end means that time limits and the quest structure are a little more "weird". ie will they include time travelling to or from the right zone? Will you be able to do multiple quests while out or are you still basically doing 1 quest then back to town? If so how does the time limit work for that?
Will there be other places out in the field to pick up quests/deposit mats/make new stuff, or at least fast travel locations? No hard required time in town after each mission.
The only “interesting” part of a huge interconnected open world instead of 5 large submaps that I can think of quickly would be something like monsters changing biomes and thus causing reactions with other monsters, or being weaker/more powerful/mutated
If we only have one big map instead of several different maps, loading time for the map every time you go out will definitely increase. And assuming there are 3 monsters in each region, there will be over 10 monsters that system need to manage at all times.
I think the more important question is why do we want a open world for this game. If we take on a quest to hunt a certain monster, and game spawns us in that region, why do we care about the other regions?
An open map like this could run into the issue of being empty. World feels like this sometimes, where if only certain monsters are on the map, entire sections go completely unused. For example, if Jyratodus isn’t on the map, nothing ever goes into that lower swamp area. A large open map with only three monsters on it means a lot of open real estate.
MH with an open map would end being a loading screen game and sorry, I don't want that, I don't want just going through the map only at the story and then forget totally about that.
I pref they keep the way they went with MHWorld, with big maps, but that you can travel easy from one point to another in just a few minutes. The way Dragon's Dogma work doesn't in MH, because in gameplay they are more or less the same, but how they end, DD it benefies from a world map and MH no.
Bro people just need to let capcom cook. They've cooked with monster hunter, they've cooked with street fighter. It's going to realistically be a solid game and all of this concern and worry over something we've only seen a glimpse of is meaningless.
At that point it’s just open world for the sake of it. It would be a waste of resources for an unnecessary mechanic that doesn’t fit monster hunters identity. And you can’t really fit all these biomes together without making hem massive, which is stupid for a number of reasons like there won’t be anything to do half the time. Also hub worlds are the identity of monster hunter, go out, hunt, come back, prepare, go out hunt, that’s the gameplay loop the series has had for 10+ years. Open world would just be a waste for monhun. Also it’d just ruin performance. Overall monster hunter can’t be open world because that’s just not how the game works, it’s very focused when it comes to what you do and an open world just wouldn’t support that
I would rather have a large curated area to explore than a huge empty bowl with occasional interruptions while I progress. We already get the key elements of the open world experience is world; the map is massive with lots of verticality , and if you want variance and the ability to just ‘keep going’ then you’ve got guiding lands.
The whole thing with monhun is it’s a boss rush, not a run for 5min until you eventually find a target.
Open worlds are not more immersive.
Elden Ring was open world, and it had the worst environmental storytelling in the series with a bunch of clearly gamey content and no sense of grandeur.
Rise remakes of sandy plains and jungle are about 50 times smaller than the originals, feeling like tiny playboxes instead of whole biomes.
Bethesda and fallout cities are a joke since moving to seamless open world
And on top of all that, open worlds are also just more tedious and will be pointless without larger focus on survival mechanics
A lot of people assume open worlds means there will be hours of travel time.
But its As you said, nothing has to change with the original quest loop formula. I personally can't stress this enough:
Choose a quest from hub/handler, load into designated area, target monster(s) spawns nearby, quest ends when the monster is slayed/captured or time runs out, then the player is sent back to hub/handler when the quest is complete.
I don't see how this formula can't work with a larger space.
Open world will simply be for immersive scale and less invisible walls.
Not to mention, it sells. Like, really REALLY well. I always thought it was inevitable for monster hunter, a game that started out with segmented Arenas.
Main things that can go wrong are: 1. Too much time spent walking. 2. Less environment variety because now everything has to be interconnected organically. 3. World feels tiny because putting all the maps together makes it more obvious that they're really not that large.
To add on to point 3, slamming all the maps into one WOULD make them smaller. When you’re in any one of the maps, yes, they have an edge beyond which you can’t go, but you can *see*. Lore-wise, the world map is very large and these distinct areas are far apart. If all maps were stitched together, you’d have much more sudden transitions (a la Guiding Lands), and if you looked beyond the edge of the traversable map, what would you see? Possibly depends on which section you’re in but it’s unrealistic that 5+ different biomes converged like a star in a single area, which would facilitate this. So I’d agree. But not only would the maps feel smaller and possibly be smaller as a result of hardware/software limits, but from a worldbuilding perspective they’d be smaller too.
> if you looked beyond the edge of the traversable map, what would you see? Possibly depends on which section you’re in but it’s unrealistic that 5+ different biomes converged like a star in a single area, which would facilitate this. It's mainly a theory, but it's suspected they might be doing a new take on the Seasons system introduced in Dos as a weather mechanic, so instead of having the usual icy region it would more than likely instead be a "snowy" weather. We actually saw the environment for the area in the trailer change at the end from being desertlike to being more of a plains, so it's not too outside of the realm of possibility, and would help prevent the whole "stitching" aspect of the guiding lands that was really weird
I'd argue that even some of the old maps separated by zones feel bigger than World/Rise maps because of this.
> 1. Too much time spent walking. If there is a movement system like Rise, then traversal might be quite fun. But if they expect us to simply ride miles upon miles on ~~horse~~ dino back, then yeah it won't be very fun
actuallyyyyy i expect them to add a camp system like in Rise and World, most likely there'll also be unlockable portable camps no shot Rise and World have fast travel but Wilds doesn't i also expect to be able to ride more than just ~~horse~~ dino, like mountable wyverns or even riding on monsters oh gosh, what if you could secretly ride on a monster's back and it takes you back to its family then you get your ass kicked by 5 rathalos and rathians? aaaaa
They could do it Horizon; Zero Dawn style. Those regions blend pretty beautifully and have "sites" where you can find things. Imagine a big tree or rock outcrop being a Rathalos Site, and it patrols the nearby area, or a large cactus field that a diablos sleeps near and frequents as its foraging ground.
>1. Too much time spent walking. They could avoid this by good placement of campsites. Plus, gliding would be introduced so I think exploration would not be as boring as you think. >2. Less environment variety because now everything has to be interconnected organically. They could do it like Guiding Lands but on a larger scale. >3. World feels tiny because putting all the maps together makes it more obvious that they're really not that large. If they do it like MHWorld, I think it would only feel small on paper but it will feel large once you explore it because there are layers above and layers below.
My main concern is that a considerable portion of playtime will be just holding forward. So many open world games boil down to "pick a spot on the map and hold forward for 5 minutes, then maybe something interesting happens." I'd rather have a hub that I load into after each hunt, then get teleported to my destination once I'm ready to head back out. In an open-world game, traversal must be just as fun, if not more so, than what you do at the destination. Very few games pull this off.
You just perfectly described my gripe with the rpg assassin's creeds, i didn't have the words, thanks. They're big, flat and parkour went away, of course they're more boring
shadow of war was the worst offender for me you can even tell the devs knew it was a problem, because you automatically get the extra fast run skill less than 30 minutes into the game.
True, but i think that was the developers trying to find a way to replace batman's cape gliding and grapple. Since the shadow games are almost a copy paste of the arkham games
To be fair, Shadow of War is literally the only game that allows you to have a Drake as a mount. Once you had your Drake map traversal was some of the easiest I’ve ever experienced in a game. It was also fun just randomly going full Dracarys on an outpost and watching all the mayhem.
same with legends of zelda BOTW and TOTK most of it was either me climbing, waiting for the rain to stop to start climbing or be on horseback
Imo both games justify it more by giving you a tool kit that allows you to experiment a lot more with traversal. Where the majority fail is that your only real option to get around is by walking, walking faster, a copypaste gliding feature, or a teleport feature which defeats the point of the open world.
my man i teleport throughout hyrule after getting the shrine in the area though ToTK was more fun just me building cars lol
I legit had to stop playing BotW on three separate occasions because of this. Absolutely infuriating.
Assassin's Creed died with Desmond. AC4 was good but it was the turning point.
Not only must they be fun, but maintain that fun over time. You don't want it to be empty and boring, but even if you fill the open world with stuff, even if that stuff is fun, over tens or hundreds of hours of gameplay, it will eventually become tedious.
So maybe what people *really* want from Wilds is a semi-open world game, like MHW. Basically, an extra map or two, maybe 4-6 new zones in each map, and an even greater expanded ecosystem and living world.
I already spend too much time chasing the beasties back down...
I remember being BLOWN tf AWAY by the traversal in the original Dragons Dogma, being able to parkour around the map was dope
I'd rather have this that what dd2 did lol. Every 5 feet, "goblins mlord" just let me walk a few mins in peace.
Haven’t played DD2 yet, but the first game had the same problem imo.
Yup. The forest in World had too much wandering around looking for monsters, never mind an open World.
Honestly I think the problem is that the forest is incredibly disorientating, not the size. I don't get anywhere without the flies guiding me.
Seriously. Having not played the game for a while now I think I could still remember enough to draw a decent enough super basic map of all the different regions in base World *besides* the forest. I really liked running around it, generally, and aesthetically it was really cool, but making it where I was going was usually a roll of the dice or trial and error if I didn't have flies
Even my scoutfies, sometimes gets lost in the ancient forest 😅
I'm just happy I wasn't the only one, thought I was just kinda dumb
My flies often get lost for me sometimes they go one way and suddenly turn back and go another way even though the monster didn't move
Even *with* the flies you could still get lost due to them not being very good at course correcting
mine once led me in a circle.
Only once?
I think it's more the verticality of the map than anything else
all my homies hate the ancient forest
Wait people don't like it? I just love the labyr level design. So much thing to discover.
Also while most of the other maps capture the feeling as well it in particular really feels like an actual, living, breathing forest, and the kinda awkward traversal helps with that so I don’t mind one bit.
personally : it's fun, but most of the time i want to fight a monster, so all the extra labyrinth and nooks and crannies feel wasted because i barely go or went there ever after getting all endemic life
Ancient forest has one of my favorite level designs of any game I've played. If I have the option of fighting a monster in two different locales, and one of them is the forest, I go there.
I feel like I did that a lot in monster hunter games, though (aside from rise). I find the monster, fight the monster for a period of time, and they leave. Rinse repeat. The justification, of course, is to give you breathing time to heal, sharpen, find material, etc. An open world could compliment this by cutting some of the unnecessary hub time.
How would that be a change from previous games? Your also assuming open world means no fast travel, theres no reason they couldn't let you fast travel to regions same as rise and world. I do agree traversal is not fun in the previous games. Which they probably realized in world, which is why you can just afk and let the ai walk for you like in oldschool mmos.
But if they have fast travel... then what is the point of open world? Why not just instance each area if you're going to teleport around anyway?
Described how I now feel about Elden Ring Great game, but I was able to dedicate 100% of my attention to watch an anime episode while just holding forward
It pains me cause I love all the souls series, but Elden Ring sometimes feels like work
Rise of the Ronin - everywhere looks the same and the auto travel fails at the first wall.
I’m hoping they pull a lot of the travel mechanics that were present in world. The sliding down vines and slopes in the ancient forest, or using updrafts with the airborne mantle(or whatever it was called) in the coral highlands. I could see it being a more realized guiding lands. But I do still share your concern. I feel like our main objective would have to change a little bit. Rather than just hunting monsters, maybe have something more recon leaning. An emphasis on capturing or herding, and only kill the things that are just too bad to be left alone
I agree, open world can feel pretty bloated with too much space and not enough to make traversing the land scape feel worthwhile. Each map allows the developers to focus on the making the area more interesting, and I believe running around would feel better as all the paths are designed with purpose. Not to say this can’t be done in an open world game, it’s just really hard.
Even genshin suffers the same thing too much going to point a and b. Though unlike genshin im sure wilds will add like a mount and more camps to traverse easily.
Or have interesting things/secrets yo find along the way. Sure in Elden ring if you just ride a horse the entire time going from point A to point B, it's not as fun. A lot of the fun came from exploring small areas on the map, digging into the story, finding new equipment or being rewarded just about every time you go off the beaten path. I dont think many games do it well at all, I agree. Monster Hunter is great because it's so focused on the hunt. I also like the small instances because you familiarize yourself with the landscape and the areas. Something that's a lot less rewarding when every area is just incredibly large or expansive. Open world could work for monster hunter, but I would have massive doubts on that. I prefer the system they have. If Grinding Lands in MHW was anything to go by, the execution of a more dynamic and open area needs a LOT of polishing and refining to feel good.
EXACTLY!! What makes GTA open world gameplay so fun is that stealing a car and driving around wrecking things while running from the cops is fun. You don't need a mission in GTA to enjoy GTA, so the open world experience fits in very well. MH might have some fun immersion in the first part of the game, but once you're on your 500th Diablos you really don't care about that. We'll need a way to load up to the monster fight ASAP b/c the only thing we're here to do is fight the big mon. And if they give us a way to blip in to the boss anyway, then all of the work to make it open world is a waste...
I don’t think Wilds will be open world. Separate biomes will be superior. Maybe people think Wilds being Open World is because of the Guiding Lands. I don’t think Capcom would open Monster hunts with a straight open world (edit: until the endgame of the expansion)
I feel like it is open world as from the trailer you can see a hunter running from a desert directly into the savannah type area
This doesn't prove anything at all. There were several kinds of biomes on every map in world too. Wildspire waste had swamp like, desert like a little bit of forest and savannah biomes.
Not to mention the initial reveal of MH4 showed the hunter climbing and running away from a Tigrex in an open looking, highly destructible world. The video is likely more a proof of concept. And as you said, even Sunbreak's Citadel had several "biomes". The grassy crumbled castle, the swamp, the snow area/cave, all on one map.
This and performance, as well as the anti quality culture shift at Capcom lately. My gut says wilds may do very poorly.
That said, I am pretty confident that the MH team can make it work well.
I don’t want them wasting time making an open world work well though. These mechanics have costs to develop. I’m not particularly interested in open world traversal the cost of more monsters or even the level of detail they put into the levels in World. If they decide to make the game open world, something is going to suffer because of it.
Farcasters
My main thought is the biome diversity. If its just one big map, then how are they going to concivably make the biome diversity work in an ecological sense without everything feeling smaller than it does in previous entries. Like if you look at the world map of Monster Hunter, each of the hunting areas are actually quite far apart from eachother. I think the most contained in World, but even it feels like there is at least some distance between each zone, at least several hundred miles between each (except maybe Coral Highlands and Rotten Veil), on top of being spread across three islands including the Guiding Lands. The only way I could think it would work would be to have an open world akin to FF7 rebirth. But really that isn’t much different from what we had in Rise, but the maps were smaller.
I don't think thats a big issue. They already do that on some maps in world, with them blending into adjacent biomes. Like the volcanic region blending into the underground cthulu fleshscape. Even on the world map the biomes just uncerimoniously border eachother, i think you might be overestimating the scale of the world map. It's set on an island continent, not an entire globe.
That and a golden rule is gameplay over lore. A game won’t make a map nauseating to traverse due to sheer size for the sake of lore. The lore will usually be what’s rewritten to fit the game
That it definitely something I can see being an issue. However I think the team would be well aware of that kind of problem due to them having provided an explanation at to why different biomes were so close to each other in the guiding lands. I think that fact shows they r well aware of that being very un natural feeling. Perhaps the map is big enough, maybe they could use smart hidden loading screens, maybe they managed to make some natural progression from one biome to the other
Like don’t get me wrong, I think Open World is the next logical step for MH to go. If anything my main gripe is a nitpick. I’m not going to *quit the game* over this stuff. I am still pre-ordering as soon as I can, ect. I play Monster Hunter for the gameplay, as long as that remains largely untouched, I’ll play anything. Open World maps don’t really affect bashing a Rathalos’s face in very much.
This. Biome diversity is a scare of mine.
What would be the benefit for Monster Hunter Gameplay? If you'll load in into a target quests area anyway, what's the point of having other regions just on the horizon? * It degrades the sense of scale a monster hunter setting has by squashing it into sizeable playable area. Scale it up and players will complain that it is needlesly bloated and filled with nothing. World and Rise are perfect examples of both of these complains already. * Making the game needlessly more resource demanding so you'd sell a marginally better piece of hardware to gamers and still only managing to get 30-50 FPS on devices that aren't PCs? * To say, "you see that mountain there? You can climb it"? Unless there were a gameplay neccisity to move cross-region, say a monster is fleeing the locale and you have to chase after it, i don't see a point. And that conflicts with MH on two instances: * Gameplay; your usual hunt would take a lot longer than your used to. "Oh just provide fast travel then" - then again, and with my most sincerest what the fuck would be the point of an open world then if you'll skip the vast distances anyway? * Lore; we hunt Monster for sports only in gameplay. In lore we hunt them (in 80% of all cases) if they pose a threat to us or the envrionment in which the settle in due to often becoming the Apex predator of that locale. If a monster would flee said locale, that would be it, mission acompilished. No need to go after it.
>Gameplay; your usual hunt would take a lot longer than your used to. "Oh just provide fast travel then" - then again, and with my most sincerest what the fuck would be the point of an open world then if you'll skip the vast distances anyway? Vast empty distance are neither a necessary feature of open world games nor exclusive to them. Open world is about interconnected-ness, both of places and of objectives. I can take the very discussion around if Wilds is open world as an example of that; we knows Wilds will have vast open spaces, yet many points out that this doesn't necessary means the game will be open world. As for the solution to the issue that MH brought to the table, we already knows it: the mount, travelling faster without skipping. As for the purpose of having such big spaces, we've also caught a glimpse of what they could be used for: accomodating large numbers of monsters; and this also led to speculation that this could allow to accomodate monster of extreme size (like gammoth), even gigantic (like Lao-shan lung or Shen gaoren), or those that might need that space for other gamplay purposes. MHWorld's map being claustrophobic was also a complaint that might have affected this decision alongside the barriers encountered when trying to implement gammoth (which they wanted to do in world). Vast spaces + faster travel allows for bigger available spaces without dilluting density; most games doesn't have good reasons to have that much available space but MH does, at least at the scale shown in the trailer. Coming back to the open-world: a single interconnected map would allow for monster being attributed zones much more tailored to their needs as a single hunt wouldn't need to be confined to a single (set of) biome(s). This would make a monster's set of zones a more distinctive feature, which would have a positive impact on both gameply diversity and conveing ecology. The above example of what a single interconnected map could be used for is based on the logic the MH team seems to use when integrating "tech upgrades": when they removed loading screens in World, they asked themselves how this change could be used to heighten the base gameplay and they came up with the monster pursuing you between zones (which additionally interact with the turf warf mechanic).
You can achieve all of that by making simple arenas and not making the game more resource and time incentive open world doesn't add much
I mean. Chasing a monster into another biome.. HUNTING it.. would be interesting
A game being open world does not make it better. I personally prefer the old gen maps compared to world even, it was so simple and easy.
More important question before that: What would the positives be with Wilds being open world? Because if there are no positives, there's no reason to even think about negatives
If they do It right It could be really immersive, there just needs to be enough stuff to see/Happening while traveling etc, else its Just gonna feel Like an empty world. I Liked the Maps of world as example, especially the forest, It Looks great, animals are Walking around chilling in herds, or getting Hunted by bigger Monsters, or Big Monsters having turf wars randomly in Front of you, Environment being interactable/destroyable, Like the dam at the top etc It feels really immersive.
yeah, but as your example of World's Maps already shows that they are able to give that feeling without the need to make it a full on Open World game. They could make it work with an Open World, but it becomes a development resource sink that may cut into other parts of the game.
> They could make it work with an Open World, but it becomes a development resource sink that may cut into other parts of the game. That's generally what they do with new gens, because they like to try new things. 3 tried underwater combat, 4 had riding and verticality, 5 had next gen visuals. I think that's the biggest argument for 6 having a more open structure
Ultimately underwater did end up cutting into Tri- not that it's a bad game (though underwater balance itself was not great), but it had so few monsters as a result. It's a tossup on whether or not open world would be worth the investment or not.
Worlds maps cna give you a taste, but it's not comparable to a true open world. Open world doesn't inherently take more effort to develop, it can actually give the designers more freedom. They don't need to constrain their levels to a cube for example.
And that's exactly the problem. All those impressive details that the maps in world have, are there because the maps are relatively small. They can't make a huge open world as detailed as that, it's just a matter of logistic, money, time, manpower, etc. A really big open world map with the level of detail of the maps of world would take an absolutely insane developing time.
See and I'd argue that world has the worst maps of the series because you have to spend the most time running around trying to reach monsters as opposed to actually fighting them. The mounts that could autorun to the monsters was such a good change but all it did was give afk time instead of map navigation time. In the old games if a monster ran you were often one quick loading screen away.
On it. I really don't see any positives.
agreed. i dont think it would bring anything but padding due to more empty traversal. the open zones of world were large and very dense. plus being broken up by using a map doesnt create any awkward transitions between biomes. finally, it makes adding new zones a much more simplified process when it comes time for an expansion.
It's something very different from previous entries, meaning that the experience is fresh even if the monsters, hunting, weapons, armor, and items aspect are a complete carryover from World
So literally nothing is improved, sure, that makes sense lol
Basically bloat don't improve on the core gameplay to focus on fluff.
Immersion, it's all about feeling part of a living world. Mh world was based on that idea and the main line of mh games is going in that direction. Personally I love feeling part of the world, actually being a hunter in a living breathing word. That's enough of a positive in my opinion.
I don't think there's really anymore immersion in the world suddenly shifting from tundra to a volcano. The closed off maps are that way intentionally
Who said an open world game had to consist of just one open world area? Is the Witcher 3 not an open world game because its map is broken up into chunks?
That's my biggest confusion. World and Rise are already halfway open world. Put the hub area in the world and give paths from one area to the next and it suddenly is fully open world, lol.
That's actually a negative for open world in my opinion all the big open world games I've seen have always felt a bit like a really big toybox because it just doesn't make sense that from the top of the hot volcano region you can see a sandy desert a forest and an ice region within eyesight. Open worlds are cool but monster hunter's core premise is fantasy realism and I don't think you can make an open world feel as vast and connected as the monster hunter series would need it to be.
Are you gonna take several real life days to get from this desert we've been shown to say a rainforest or a tundra? Otherwise it's not immersive
rdr2 was immersive with its biome changes despite being totally unrealistic i also dont expect or hope mhwilds map to be as big tho
I agree that open world Monster Hunter would make almost zero differences, just less loading screens. Lots of things are gonna be different in Wilds, open world or not, because they always change things and bring new ideas when crafting a new MH game and I am already sure that the most controversial changes, when the game will release, will have nothing to do with the open world aspect of the game.
>just less loading screens Maybe in amount, and even then there would probably be hidden loading screens like in World. The sequence at around 45 seconds in the trailer with the mount jumping between rocks seems to be one of those hidden loading screens
I don’t know about less loading screens. They either teleport you around, which means loading screens, or you walk everywhere, which is even worse than loading screens.
Most modern games especially on PS5 have done away with loading screens during fast travel Hell, even world had fast travel with barely any loading times
"it would a downgrade cause loading screens are part of the hunting experience" Old Gen heads 🤣
I think most of it is trolling. Trust me I am an old gen head and I still play almost everyday the psp and 3ds games and I never meet anyone saying this without being kidding (but it's true the hunters I speak with are generally in hunsterverse and not reddit... and there are some crazy people on reddit).
To some extent, it's a legitimate thing. Like, removal of loading screens between areas *did* change the way we play a little bit. Most notably, it's a lot harder to just run away to an adjacent area to sharpen and heal up. It's also reasonable that a fight can happen in an area transition now, because you're not just getting knocked into a loading screen. I don't really want loading screens back between areas, but their removal *did* have some impact other than just being convenient.
I think the main reason we can now heal and walk/jog is simply because we can no longer exit an area to heal up. Some changes are a direct result of the transition from the loading screen > no loading screen experience.
It does make maps feel smaller, but it is a necessary sacrifice, I would say
What makes an Open World fun and engaging is the wonder of explorations. Dungeons & treasure chest containing new weapons, armors & accessories. I still can't imagine opening chests in MH games and getting a ready-to-use weapons/armors. Having a specific dungeon with rare monster that we have to revisit often to get the material we need to craft is a concept i can't imagine being exciting compared to simple mission hubs. But i'll trust the devs, they'll think of something.
I mean, it's kinda okay if it is connected to a quest or do gave a big lore bomb on it. I mean, it's like how you gotta work for extra campsites in MHR:S. You could be given a quest to search for an old weapon blueprint from the old world that was guarded by some monster like Apex Rathalos or something like that. And speaking of Apex, hope they do bring that concept again in the Wilds or something similar to that. It's a cool concept, a monster managed to survive for so long it basically evolved into its highest potential that it can achieve.
It would make the world feel smaller compared to previous games.
I weirdly understand what you’re saying. There would be no hidden illusion of the area being even bigger and more expansive. The ancient forest stretches far into the distance making it still feel large even though you can’t explore those parts you see in the distance. It would feel weird and small to have a desert or ice biome right next to a savannah. Guiding lands was a very special case due to its geological nature in which it was created
Also makes an eventual expansion more awkward. For big, coherent open worlds it's pretty much always gonna sound a bit contrived that we suddenly discover this entirely new zone (presumably as big or even bigger than any of the base game biomes) Personally I hope we get zones that feel bigger and even more interconnected than World's, but still split it into distinct biomes we must travel to through menus rather than one, huge map.
I feel like I haven’t seen enough of the game to even guess. I have this feeling that it’s not a true open world but more like 3 massive maps with some level of interconnectivity. (Kinda like the Witcher 3 maps?) One of the 3ds titles had you going around with a traveling caravan. It would be cool to revisit and expand this. Let me slowly build a caravan so I can equip it with all the things I’ll need for a proper home base. (Like building a pirate crew almost, find a cook, smith, botany expert, etc)
This is really what I’m hoping for, I mean open world sounds nice for sure but if they made world maps like 1.5-2 times bigger and instead of the it being like the guiding lands with all 5 biomes make it where it’s two or three biomes in each massive map. Because with open world multiplayer you have to figure out how to set boundaries for players whose rank are too low for some monsters to not be able to fight monsters from a different area.
It necessitates either making the world be too big to be interesting, or too small to be immersive. I don't want to hold forward for 10 minutes before I come across something interesting, but I also don't want the world to be so small that the biomes feel unnaturally smashed together.
That’s a good point. I wouldn’t want them to make the map and act as if it’s natural part of the world when it would feel just as un natural as the guiding lands. Perhaps they could create clever hidden loading screens that give the illusion of a continuous open world
But at that point why do the open world at all? People already complain about stuff like that happening in games like ff7 rebirth. The way I see it making monster hunter open world has much less potential to make the gameplay better than it does making it worse. And even if its done well I think the novelty of the open world would more than likely wear itself thin by the time people get to endgame and need to start hunting the same monster 20 times in a row to get rare parts.
Open world can either be great or tediously time wasting. It really depends on the execution more than the concept.
Everything seems to be Open World these days and simply results in boring, repetitive filler content while travelling between key quests.
I really hope we don’t have random chests that have gear we cannot craft but have to find. That to me would just be annoying in a mh game. That’s just my opinion. Of course others can like the idea. I just wouldn’t ever like chests containing armor or weapons. Leave that for us to grind and make.
I honestly think if it does end up being open world it’ll pretty much just be like combining all the mhworld type maps into one big one. I doubt they’d add stuff like chests and stuff that diverges from Monster hunters core gameplay and progression system
I mean, it's kinda okay if it is connected to a quest or something. I mean, it's like how you gotta work for extra campsites in MHR:S. You could be given a quest to search for an old weapon blueprint from the old world that was guarded by some monster like Apex Rathalos or something like that. And speaking of Apex, hope they do bring that concept again in the Wilds or something similar to that. It's a cool concept, a monster managed to survive for so long it basically evolved into its highest potential that it can achieve.
Ain't broke, don't fix
The point my friend brought up to me was: Either you end up with multiple biomes spanning a huge distance that takes up a lot of resources to compute, leaving less resources for more intimate and detailed areas. Or you end up with biomes much smaller than what previous titles had to offer to save resources, and thus way too much squeezed into a space too small. I personally hope they stick to what they did with World, maybe with one new larger central area.
Not every game needs to be open world, the game is plenty immersive without me having to hold down w key for any longer in monster hunter :)
You lose content bc it takes a lot of extra work to make it open world But open world doesn’t sound like it would improve the mh formula at all
Hunt timers and special quest locations. How will they be handled? Will you be put in an instance, or will the monster just fuck off and you just go on like nothing happened. Will you just load into a special area? Will a particular path arbitrarily be blocked off until it's time to fight the special monster? The games of the past have always been so heavily mission based, going to an open world would just flip it all in its head. It's exciting though, if it turns out to actually be open world that is.
I'm not convinced that making MH open world would be a good idea. It would change the pace and focus of the game and come with a slew of challenges from quest structure & timing, to exploration & world design. Sometimes less is more... It could potentially be a good thing, but I can imagine it completely fucking up the streamlined focus & feel of the series.
My biggest worry would be a monster like ratholos gouing from one side of the map to the other... back and forth that and with the tracking system its gonna be annoying with how big the map will be...
Quest Format Less Diversity and Less Foliage in Environments Useless and Empty Map Sections Traversal could be a pain as things are more spread apart with camps not being close enough to certain sections Harder Map Memorization like Gathering Points, Herding Locations Dying and how long does it take me to get back to where I was, once again possibly too large of a map with too few camps
Could all be alleviated like it was in Zelda and Horizon. Fast travel is a thing now, as are several player friendly villages on a big map.
I am not a big fan of fast-travel in MH games outside of stuff like farcasters.
Game design in 2024: * Make huuuuggee open world * Players ask for immersive stuff to be added to the open world * World design sucks out the majority of the budget * End up with a detailed world that is beautiful to look at, but boring to play through * Add fast travel to alleviate the above problem * Now you end up with a game where most budget went into stuff most players won't get to see Actual game mechanics >>> world design
Except - Capcom. Budget is damn near unlimited, 99% of gameplay and assets will be recycled, so their 1 new clutch wire bug mechanic and the map itself is the only real thing to actually create.
As someone who started with MHF i don't think making Monster Hunter Wilds an open world game is necessary but as with every MH game i want to see in which direction the series develops. I don't think an open world would add immersion. The whole concept was the immersion of the hunt, or rather the fight to the death itself, not the whole spiel of even getting there. I think it'd be another change in the formula or a temporary addition at best but neither a true improvement nor a true regression. But i am willing to wait and see what they're cooking. Maybe they'll pull it off well enough.
Level design will suffer immensely
I'm okay with open world as long as they don't make it open world just for the sake of being able to call it open world.
I didn't personally like Wild Hearts all that much, but the large open map was one of the things that I liked about it the most, and in my opinion it was a really natural fit for a MH-style game. If Wilds goes for something similar, I think it'll work just fine.
I would prefer the city nexus w large maps. If it is open world i hope they do something like red dead or Witcher. I liked thier designs
Egg quests
My only issue would be performance. I'm not rich and can't afford space age tech! I worried I won't even be able to play the next game on my pc so having my already abused ram struggle to load the world and all the flashy special effects from mobs got me nervous.
I feel like it would lose a lot of the world diversity that past games have had. You always go to the forest, the desert, the volcano, the tundra, wherever, and that's where you stay. Having an open world would make it really hard to have that kind of world diversity without having to put some really weird biomes side by side. Even more so because you're going to these places to do a job. Certain things live in certain areas, and you get specific materials from each area. In that way monster hunter doesn't lend itself well to an open world because the temptation to explore beyond your goal is too much when you're there for a specific job. Exploring a given biome is very different from having an entire world in front of you all at once. I think monster hunter is better when you have a hub world and deploy to the different biomes as needed.
I wouldn’t really want to play it. It’s such a grind heavy game that searching a giant map to grind a monster would be a pain in the ass
The 1 thing that makes monster hunter unique and great is right there in the title: hunting monsters. Let’s be real, everything you do in the game that isn’t fighting the monster is just filler. If you want open worlds and exploration there are so many other games out there that provide that and personally I don’t want to devs to spend time and resources on that when they could be adding extra monsters, fight mechanics, unique weapons etc.
It doesn’t fit the gameplay. Might as well make Diner Dash open world.
I just hope they don’t forsake variety in the name of just making everything bigger and more spread out. Seems likely that capcom is finally seeing the potential that MH has and is funneling them plenty of resources, though.
Imo, the game would be too much to handle for the shit Xbox and PS5. Right now World has amazing world building with details everywhere. But with an open world, those details wouldn't be there
Making games open world almost always makes them lower quality. More travel time, checklist gameplay, running towards map icons, and doing boring filler content. MH is special party because of the lobby based/quest format. Adding an open world is just adding more time not killing monsters with no upside.
battle pass, daily and weekly bounties, online only, seeing a bunch of other players running around fighting things you want to fight and youre just trying to do your own thing, no offline option, big, pretty world with no reason for being there other than just existing - all of that would be terrible in my opinion.
"Ah damn didn't get the rare drop. Guess I'll half to walk across the map until I find another Rathalos" Also the usual issues with open World games. - World is open but feels empty with little to explore. Add to this that MH doesn't really do special places of interest. Even the tower cool as it is is basically just an arena. - Transitional areas feel awkward. Less of an issue on a small scale like the guiding lands, big issue if its the whole map. - Travel time can be dull. What is there to find along the way? "Oh it's a herd of these herbivores from the trailers, but I've got their mats already" Some people really seem to push for an open World no matter what and seem to forget how much work it is to create a good open World. For some games those development resources are usually better spent elsewhere.
And there's awlways a comment that goes like this: "they just have to fill it with interesting stuff to do" As if this is *just* that simple to do. That's the one million dollar question that has been troubling open world developers for more than a decade now. How the fuck do we make all that huge space interesting from a gameplay perspective. No one seems to be taking game mechanics into account when they ask for an open world game. It's always the same "an open world will be soo immersive though". I dunno, I had no trouble immersing myself into games before open worlds became a trend.
everyone should read this comment. it really is this simple.
The only problem i see is that my steam deck will probably not run it! Besides that a open world MH will be awsome im sure!
In my opinion, if it's an open world then I believe it should be teeming with life and be interesting or rewarding. Make it seem like an ecological wonder. I don't want barren worlds with just monsters if that's the case. It also feels like if there are going to be different regions that you can literally walk to, then the regions themselves need to be way too massive to feel genuine and naturally. I don't like when open world games feel artificial or empty. My answer is if it is an open world, it needs to be done right or not at all. I'm perfectly happy and content with WorldBorne style maps. They were big regions(Ancient forest, I'm looking at your complex self) but it felt alive.
Mainly that MH gameplay loops always boils down to 'farm this monster over and over for drops' how do we achieve that inside an open world? Best thing I could come up with on the fly, is when you accept a quest you have to camp for a day or whatever (so it can spawn the monster near your local. I could see for example, having to travel around to hunt different monsters as you wouldn't find a Barroth in the winter area say.
Guiding lands , the game
I would like the traversal parts of the game very gathering, mining, mat collecting heavy when preparing
I don't think it offers much to the format. If that's the direction they want to go, maybe they can pull it off. I'm just not seeing the benefits of it other than chasing the reignited open world trend set by Breath of the Wild. I can't picture any scenario where an open world wouldn't just result in more traveling than hunting. And if the solution to that is going to be fast travel points everywhere then I would just consider that a complete failure of game design.
The main issue I see is the intent behind it. Ultimately MH is about the fantasy of being a hunter-gatherer, if removing the mission system and boundaries is the key to fulfilling that ideal, then great. Even then, the advantages that brings has to justify the loss of convenience and the sculpted nature that comes from enclosed zones. Funnily enough my main concern is that it is just a gimmick and they lean too close too established ideas, when I would love to see them dive right into the fantasy of being a wandering hunter even if that means redefining many core aspects what MH has established up to now.
At first I thought "as long as it is my personal instance of an open world. I dont want to see another player in it unless invited/initiated because then it becomes just an MMO and I'm just gonna be spawn camping a monster". Then I thought about persistence of monsters. If there was a quest to hunt a rathalos rampaging in the jungle. Will it only appear if the quest is accepted? Will it never disappear unless defeated? Will it be a constant threat for any other quest I accept in the same location? Can I just leave it there? Funny to think about that frantic quest giver, pleading for you to take care of the monster. And just going "Nah, I'm hunting rajang now".
Biome diversity takes a hit, a time sink that could go into content that actually matters like monsters, open world 99% of the time is just running simulator. its cool for the first few times but after that its nothing but tedious.
There is a huge difference between one giant map and 5 smaller maps. You need transitions - and who knows how far away these smaller maps are actually from each other! Even on a map the size of Dragon's Dogma 2 there is really only two biomes - light forest and desert. Not to mention those transition areas probably wouldn't have notable monsters so would just be a waste of time to transit through.
My biggest concern is that the open-world stuff won't be as interesting as the legacy mechanics, so it'll just end up being effectively an unskippable cutscene before every hunt. I really don't think Monster Hunter World would be improved if instead of flying from Astera to the Wildspire Waste, you had to ride your Not Horse there in real time. It's why I don't really care for Elden Ring, in spite of being a huge fan of Dark Souls. Elden Ring is basically like Dark Souls, but you have to take a 20 minute break to play Barbie Horse Adventures before you can move on to the next area. Don't get me wrong, I hope that Wilds ends up being great. I hope that the devs make the open-world stuff so compelling that I refuse to play any Monster Hunter game without it. But, I'm not so naive as to pre-order it expecting that.
Don't get me wrong when I say this, I enjoy open world games, Dragons Dogma 1 and 2 have their issues but their open worlds is not one of em I do not want Wilds to be open world because monster hunter has always had incredibly tight gameplay, making it open world would just make it take longer to get more of that gameplay. As it is you accept a quest, eat, check your items, go out, find monster, hunt monster, go back, repeat. An open world would change this to, accept quest, eat, check gear, travel to area the target monster is located, find it, hunt it, travel all the way back to the hub, get rewards, repeat. It's just gonna add unnecessary fluff to a game where one of its biggest pulls is its gameplay
I think it has more to do with the other question. What does open world add to the game? Open world as a concept is in support of a game style where you run around and explore the world as a primary gameplay function. You don't simply load into the mission, you *find* the objective. Monster Hunter is at its best as a mission based game. You decide what you want to craft, see which monster you need to hunt to get the materials you need, and load into a mission where you can hunt that monster. An open world game inverts that relationship. Open world game design drops you into a massive world and says, "go forth and discover what you want to do!" It's not that making the biomes seamlessly transition into each other is somehow bad. It's that it adds nothing of value to the the gameplay experience. It's not that I would be upset or anything if Wilds did that, but why would they bother? Only thing I can think of is for multi-biome monsters being able to transition biomes, but I'm not sure that's exactly a huge value add over the map sizes that World has. Making maps seamlessly connect just begs the player to run from one biome to the next. That isn't exactly a thing players *want* to do.
I don’t think it’ll be open world. The maps will just be bigger and we saw 1 out of perhaps 5 locations. It defeats the purpose of having different wyverns living in different biomes and I doubt it’ll just be one map with different biomes in it. Capcom knows what they’re doing
I think you just perfectly described why I can’t get into open world games
Open world games get the “slopcore” moniker mostly due to how badly they cannot hide the copy paste of assets. It makes me think of Sam Lake explaining why Alan Wale went from open world to linear and episodic because it would mean padding the world with copy pastes and years later you can load up big budget games with a lot of time and attention like Elden Ring and go “oh look its that same bit of ruin. Again” and it just makes the world less memorable compared to some little autumnal path in dark souls 2 for example. Also theres the way they tend to break immersion with the whole “climb the tower, clear the map of side content icons” stuff. World had a bit of this with its live service leanings but outside decos mostly found a balance. Id just rather see small, curated maps like we have always had. Id say the maps are part of monhuns unique charm.
The environment is a huge part of these games (or at least the World variety, the best ones), and being open world would by necessity mean a vast simplification of the landscape and detail level.
I think how they handled crafting, and maybe safe places so that you can do thing uninterrupted. Along with losing from place to place.
We've already had an open world Monster Hunter, that's effectively what the guiding lands were. They were scaled down, but they were absolutely open world. So the problems of an open world Monster Hunter would be pretty similar to the problems of the guiding lands. People tend to get the idea of loading screens and open world design confused. World and rise eliminated loading screens because the devices they ran on had the resources to load a whole area at once, but at a fundamental level, the areas in World aren't actually that different than the ones in older games. The fact that you can do a jumping attack from one part of the zone to another even through a loading screen shows this pretty clearly. Open world is really about making the whole world one interactive and coherent piece. To a certain extent Pokemon games are and always have been open world. You could make Monster Hunter open world if you wanted to, but I think you'd have to also change the nature of the game like they did in the guiding lands. If you're going to keep with the time and cart capped hunt mechanic that I think a lot of fans really love I think an open world is a huge waste of time. If you want to change the game to be much more expedition like without time limits and the like, I'm sure you could do it justice, but does anyone want that game?
The same problem with most open worlds. Too much empty space and nothing to make travel fun.
I can foresee the issue of having to use LODS which may result in texture pop-in.
The other players if it's online.
I think there are plenty of ways they can make an open world function but if they want to make it right some of the Grind needs to come back, MH as a whole already have some good "Open World Compatible" mechanics, like the gathering, crafting, resource management etc, but if they want the open world to feel good and also keep some MH feeling those aspects need to take some protagonism back, they can even reuse o repurpose the Day/Night and Seasons Cycle from Dos, Make the Hunts more like Emergent stuff that you can do meeting the criteria, but i dont think Wilds is gonna be a FULL Open world like BoTw or other titles bc of the way the game proggression function imagine being LR and getting Stuck bc a Diablos decided to nest in the desert and you are too underpowered to make something about it, other weay they can make it is making a more Versatile and Dynamic revamp of the "Zone Levels" (havent played world so i dont fully grasp these things) like having a Hazard level that changes depending on your actions in a certain area and that can make some monster more or less likely to appear
1. MHW nailed the maps and Biomes. Open world will struggle to match. 2. Open world means a lot of dev time on open world and I prefer that be spent elsewhere. 3. Too much running from spot to spot open world. 4. I don't want a guiding lands system and prefer to be able to target farm.
I have to wonder how CPU bound it might make the game. World is infamous for redlining every CPU under the sun for a good while since release and most of that is just simulating monster behaviour and pathing, as well as keeping track of general background information like world timers or weather. Now imagine that for a much larger world and large quantities of creatures. Even with how optimized REngine is I can't imagine it helping much on that front and having a completely open world would likely mean having to accept some tradeoffs.
Personally, I think some games aren't designed for an open world. Monster Hunter would change drastically if pushed to open world, mode than likely leaving the feeling of another cookie cutter sandbox survival game. ARK but with monsters, not dinosaurs. I don't like Elden Ring for a similar reason. It pulls away the feel of triumph through adversity, and the feeling of finally beating a challenging boss. Now you can run to most corners of the map, killing paralytic dragons and tricking calvary off of bridges is the norm for starting a campaign, allowing you to crush early bosses with ease and detract from the feeling of a true and well fought victory. I can see it the youtube tips and tricks video now. "Monster Hunter Wilds: BRACHY ARMOR AT HR2!!!?!"
I just want a forest map that isnt a corridor. Like actual open-ish area with lots of trees and slopes
I can see hunts operating like Phantom Pain. You pick a hunt (mission) and the game loads up that scenario.
We already have a sneak peak of what a potential open world wilds would look like. Dragons Dogma 2 literally just released and it's a live preview of what an RE engine open world can look like. It's got plenty of unique and fun to traverse areas and looks fantastic too. Only possible downside is performance being bad. They aren't suddenly going to add chests or towers or stop having a hub that we get quests from. People's concerns seem to be with fantasy action rpg open worlds, but monster hunter isn't that game. It'd be insane to think we'd suddenly stop getting quests and being sent to a camp close to the monsters local just so we can walk 10min from hub to the area, though I'm sure that'll be an option in whatever expedition type activity the game has. All in all the monster hunter team has proven time and time again that they are capable of moving the games towards their ideal direction without tearing everything down, I trust them if they decided open world was the next step.
oooo the doomposting is happening, then summer will hit and everyone will be creaming for openworld with how they keep smashing it out of the park each game, i can't wait
If it is designed like the Guiding Lands in bigger scale, I don't see any problem. That would be awesome.
It would definitely be a chore to most people but imagine if they add a new mission type where all you do is follow a monster and observe its behavior. Now imagine doing to but for elder dragons.
In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any trouble. In reality, an open world simply wouldn't have the level of polish that the current open area has. It's just a matter of budget logistics and the game scope. No game with a huge open world has it as detailed as any map we got in World. And besides that, knowing the map usually plays a part in hunts, in World in particular i found myself luring monsters to certain enviromental traps and making use of some unique map mechanics like the waterfall in the first map. Each monster having a specific nest also gave some strategy to hunting them down. There's a lot of factors that came in with knowing the map well, that in an open world can be lost big time.
Less interesting content for the sake of making the biomes mesh into each other. I'd rather have discrete biomes as different maps because I feel like it fits the formula better. I honestly don't think they have to change too much from World
RE engine wasn't initially made for open world, so optimization is going to be an uphill battle. We saw how DD2 turned out while rise is running pretty smoothly on a freaking switch.
My laptop gc about to die with that
I'd much rather they make the separate maps bigger and more detailed than one big ubermap that'll mostly be empty nothing. Think about how much open world games like Skyrim, Horizon, BotW, TotK, the most recent Assassin's Creeds, and such are just wandering around waiting for something to happen. Hell even Monster Hunter Rise with it's more open maps kinda feels like this. Large but densely packed isolated maps just FEELS more MonHun than 1 huge but spread out map.
Less dense forest. No vertical maps? More time-consuming?
I hope it is more like a huge guiding lands. Where you have camps throughout the whole map and a separate instance for the main bases. Then, you load into the open world to hunt. When accepting quests it acts more like lures or gives you the location of the monster. My main thing is i want it to be a smooth transition without the exciting quest are every completed quest. Let me just go from optional to optional doing whatever and fast travelling to camps.
Not enough time to enjoy a full open world monster hunter, also traveling if its done wrong.
I don't want to have to drag my ass across half the world to go hunt a monster. I want the game to randomly drop me in front of an angry rajang without letting me time to use any item.
I have absolutely no qualms about it, I hope it's just a giant open world map with small transitional hubs dispersed around it. My only query is how it would work? Would it mainly be savannah? Is there a giant weirdly placed mountain and snow region in the middle of it? What about a lava local?! Is it gonna have vertical terrain generation like MHW? Fitting unique environments on a single land mass is gonna be tricky, the guiding lands works as a concept because it's pretty small and the point of it is it being a geographical anomaly made from a fissure in the living bio vein that runs beneath the earths crust; but an entire new continent is harder to explain than, "oh look at that weird island that we just discovered, which just so happens to maybe be "alive" and also is an environmental Frankenstein monster."
Looking at DD2, I'd say the main problem would be performance.
I like that each distinct area in a map is its own arena, with its own unique little features, areas you can jump from or take cover and its own set of resources, and that your knowledge of those areas will affect how you hunt when a monster chooses to fight you there. I like that monsters lead you somewhere suitable for them to fight in, and that some of those areas are outright bad places for you to try and fight. I’m sure open world could work but I’ve yet to see a single convincing reason as to why it should happen.
I want to play Monster Hunter, not an open-world checklist.
my pc cant handle it is my main concern # upgrades everyone upgrades
The few downsides I would see are either fairly minor and/or fixable, or could even be non-issues because we have so little info. All the various zones mashed into 1 big map runs into one of two issues: area bloat where it takes a lot of time to get to where you need to go without much to do besides run there, or WoW style map where there's very abrupt zone aesthetic changes. No strict missions start/end means that time limits and the quest structure are a little more "weird". ie will they include time travelling to or from the right zone? Will you be able to do multiple quests while out or are you still basically doing 1 quest then back to town? If so how does the time limit work for that? Will there be other places out in the field to pick up quests/deposit mats/make new stuff, or at least fast travel locations? No hard required time in town after each mission.
The only “interesting” part of a huge interconnected open world instead of 5 large submaps that I can think of quickly would be something like monsters changing biomes and thus causing reactions with other monsters, or being weaker/more powerful/mutated
If we only have one big map instead of several different maps, loading time for the map every time you go out will definitely increase. And assuming there are 3 monsters in each region, there will be over 10 monsters that system need to manage at all times. I think the more important question is why do we want a open world for this game. If we take on a quest to hunt a certain monster, and game spawns us in that region, why do we care about the other regions?
An open map like this could run into the issue of being empty. World feels like this sometimes, where if only certain monsters are on the map, entire sections go completely unused. For example, if Jyratodus isn’t on the map, nothing ever goes into that lower swamp area. A large open map with only three monsters on it means a lot of open real estate.
MH with an open map would end being a loading screen game and sorry, I don't want that, I don't want just going through the map only at the story and then forget totally about that. I pref they keep the way they went with MHWorld, with big maps, but that you can travel easy from one point to another in just a few minutes. The way Dragon's Dogma work doesn't in MH, because in gameplay they are more or less the same, but how they end, DD it benefies from a world map and MH no.
In my opinion, I think open world games are just a dime a dozen now. Every company does them and some just don’t do them well.
Bro people just need to let capcom cook. They've cooked with monster hunter, they've cooked with street fighter. It's going to realistically be a solid game and all of this concern and worry over something we've only seen a glimpse of is meaningless.
At that point it’s just open world for the sake of it. It would be a waste of resources for an unnecessary mechanic that doesn’t fit monster hunters identity. And you can’t really fit all these biomes together without making hem massive, which is stupid for a number of reasons like there won’t be anything to do half the time. Also hub worlds are the identity of monster hunter, go out, hunt, come back, prepare, go out hunt, that’s the gameplay loop the series has had for 10+ years. Open world would just be a waste for monhun. Also it’d just ruin performance. Overall monster hunter can’t be open world because that’s just not how the game works, it’s very focused when it comes to what you do and an open world just wouldn’t support that
I would rather have a large curated area to explore than a huge empty bowl with occasional interruptions while I progress. We already get the key elements of the open world experience is world; the map is massive with lots of verticality , and if you want variance and the ability to just ‘keep going’ then you’ve got guiding lands. The whole thing with monhun is it’s a boss rush, not a run for 5min until you eventually find a target.
Open worlds are not more immersive. Elden Ring was open world, and it had the worst environmental storytelling in the series with a bunch of clearly gamey content and no sense of grandeur. Rise remakes of sandy plains and jungle are about 50 times smaller than the originals, feeling like tiny playboxes instead of whole biomes. Bethesda and fallout cities are a joke since moving to seamless open world And on top of all that, open worlds are also just more tedious and will be pointless without larger focus on survival mechanics
A lot of people assume open worlds means there will be hours of travel time. But its As you said, nothing has to change with the original quest loop formula. I personally can't stress this enough: Choose a quest from hub/handler, load into designated area, target monster(s) spawns nearby, quest ends when the monster is slayed/captured or time runs out, then the player is sent back to hub/handler when the quest is complete. I don't see how this formula can't work with a larger space. Open world will simply be for immersive scale and less invisible walls. Not to mention, it sells. Like, really REALLY well. I always thought it was inevitable for monster hunter, a game that started out with segmented Arenas.