Monster Hunter World Could Finally Be The Series’s Breakout Global Hit

Jonny Weston Jun 25, 2017

  1. Jonny Weston

    Jonny Weston
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    Big changes for a bigger audience

    Ryozo Tsujimoto didn’t set out to create a Monster Hunter game aimed at Western audiences. It’s more like he stumbled upon the idea. Four years ago, Tsujimoto, who serves as producer on the upcoming Monster Hunter World, sat down with his development team at Capcom’s Osaka headquarters to brainstorm just what the next Monster Hunter should look like. Their first goal was to create a game for the modern generation of consoles. This was a big shift for a series that, despite debuting on the PS2 in 2004, has since become synonymous with portable platforms.

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    First, there was the question of what to do with all of that extra power. The team decided they wanted to create a world that was much more realistic than in games past. A place where the creatures that players hunt behave in ways that seem natural; where there’s a plausible ecosystem of plants, animals, and weather; and where it’s all connected by one huge, seamless map.

    For a series like Monster Hunter — where new games have very slowly evolved over the years — these changes are huge. As the name implies, the series has long been about hunting monsters, as players earn skills and gear to take down bigger and bigger foes as they progress through the game. But past Monster Hunter games were often rigid, with arcane rules and worlds that felt like a series of boxed-off areas. That was something the team wanted to change.

    As development continued, Tsujimoto realized that, with this concept, Monster Hunter World could finally be the game that takes the series from Japanese phenomenon to worldwide hit. “We didn’t make a bunch of changes just because we want to get Western gamers on board,” he explains. “Our love of Monster Hunter made this new concept, and this new concept is something we think and hope is going to be really appealing to the West.”


    Monster Hunter is by all accounts a very successful franchise, spanning nearly a dozen games, with cumulative sales of more than 40 million. But its success has largely been concentrated in Japan — and that’s something the team has struggled with for years. “When you look at the history of the Monster Hunter franchise in the West,” Tsujimoto told Polygon in 2013, “you can't really say that it's been a huge success.” There are a number of potential reasons for this. For one, Monster Hunter typically features a steep learning curve, complex controls, and action that feels much slower than in other, seemingly similar games. It’s a series that requires dedication, which can make it especially tough for beginners.

    There’s also the matter of platform. Over the years, a large part of the appeal of Monster Hunter has been its focus on local multiplayer. It’s something that’s been popular in Japan, where groups of players will join up in the real world, PSP or 3DS in hand, and hunt powerful monsters together. But in the West, where online play is more popular, it hasn’t quite caught on. Monster Hunter World, meanwhile, will be available on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One when it launches next year, with a PC version following later on.

    Neither console is especially huge in Japan; the Xbox One’s presence is virtually nonexistent, while the country accounts for just 5 million of the more than 60 million PS4s sold globally to date. (The 3DS, by comparison, has sold more than 20 million units in Japan, around a third of global sales for the handheld.) “We’re bringing the game to where the players mostly are in the West,” Tsujimoto says, “which I think is going to be a big breakthrough factor.”

    Source: The Verge
     

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