Capcom is in an interesting position with Monster Hunter Rise, the new title for Nintendo Switch. 2018’s Monster Hunter World was a huge triumph, taking the series to a Western audience accustomed to home consoles and PCs, becoming one of the company’s best-selling games ever. But it had to leave some of the biggest factors behind Monster HunterJapanese Success: Portability and Local Multiplayer.
Since Capcom started working Monster Hunter WorldHowever, the Switch has become a global hit, and on paper it sounds like it should be a perfect system for the series. It’s much more capable than the PSP and 3DS hardware that made it Monster Hunter a social phenomenon in Japan, while offering the flexibility to let you play on your TV or on the go. That’s true Rise comes in.
“We think by releasing this on a portable console, we’ve made it a lot more accessible, a lot easier to pick up and play,” said producer Ryōzō Tsujimoto. The edge“It is of course also easier to play with people in your immediate environment. So it’s great for playing at home with your family, and you can pick it up and play whenever you want – you can do a few quick quests before you go to sleep. So yes, we think it will bring some people back [who didn’t play World] because it is so easy to access and how easy it is to retrieve it. “
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But the Switch presents technical challenges Monster Hunter Rise as compared to World, which used more powerful PS4 and Xbox One hardware as a baseline for development. earlier Monster Hunter games took place in small, numbered areas separated by loading screens, while World had complex multilevel stages that you could explore seamlessly. Rise manages to divide the difference – you wouldn’t confuse the ecological complexity with that of World, but the graphics fidelity is impressive for the Switch, and there are no load times once you’re in a level.
“In the very early stages of development, we played around a bit around the idea of keeping the same card system from the older games, with separate areas separated by loading screens,” said director Yasunori Ichinose. “But in the course of development, as we saw how World was in fact getting the request to open up all environments as in WorldSo it was not something we planned from the beginning, but it is something that we are certainly happy with. ”
The stages also have a much greater degree of verticality compared to previous games – Ichinose says that’s what the ‘Rise’ in the title refers to – and the ability to zip through the environments with the new Wirebug or on the back of a Palamute dog riding companion offers even more traversal options. In fact, Ichinose says that’s why Capcom decided to map the locations of the monsters from the start of each quest, rather than force hunters to track them all over again. Rise, figuring out how to get to the monsters can be a challenge in and of itself.
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Still, I wondered if Capcom had weighed the risk of losing some of its fans who jumped on board World and perhaps expect another technical leap forward. May the move to Switch have an effect on Risepopularity in the West?
“We’re not really worried about that,” said Tsujimoto. ‘I mean, every time we have one Monster Hunter game, we make sure it is a good real new game Monster Hunter game. It’s not like we’ve invested less in our portable submissions or anything like that. It’s just that Monster Hunter Rise is a game that happens to be on a portable console, so we’ve optimized it for that. But it doesn’t really change anything from a gameplay perspective – it’s still a lot Monster Hunterso the fans will still enjoy it. ”
By the way, as Tsujimoto confirmed at the end of our interview, Monster Hunter Rise is actually also coming to PC, with Capcom targeting a release date sometime in early 2022. That should be a good option for anyone who’s reluctant to give up World‘s smooth frame rates on modern hardware. However, if you plan on playing on Switch, you only have a month to go – Monster Hunter Rise will be released worldwide on March 26.