Playing the Monster Hunter Wilds beta feels like previewing my entire 2025. This is it, folks. This is where I will spend several hundred hours next year. It's more Monster Hunter, shiny and new. Even in a hacked off and inelegant beta package with no real single-player option, no gear or build crafting, UI hangups, and a few performance concerns, I've still been chucking my evenings into it just to hear that combat system sing.
I've played the early PS5 beta for about six hours, which feels like rating a whole sandwich after picking off and eating the bread. Still, it is good bread. Four new monsters and 14 revamped weapons? Yeah, that'll kill another dozen hours once the beta is on all platforms. A new Monster Hunter game always feels like an occasion, and Monster Hunter Wilds is an especially energetic one so far. The beta feels good, often great, with the foundations of Monster Hunter World – far more than Monster Hunter Rise – weaving in changes and features that take the reins and steer this thing in exciting new directions.
The world after World
First impressions, then. The beta environment, the Windward Plains, is ginormous, and stuffed with environmental tools that I habitually ignore in favor of just stabbing monsters. Vine traps, falling boulders, healing bugs and plants, resources galore – you know the drill. The 3D map is a big upgrade and makes navigation much smoother, as does the Google Maps-equipped bird mount called a Seikret, which will just auto-taxi you to whatever monster you're after.
I like Focus Mode a lot more than I thought I would
The stalking and tracking part of the hunter side of Monster Hunter has definitely been streamlined even more. I know that will bum some people out, but as someone who's mainly just here for boss fights and a peerless crafting grind, I'm not complaining. Seikret, take me to this Chatacabra, on the double. And don't go anywhere; I need you to scrape me off the pavement the next time a monster curb-stomps me because I got greedy with my combos. The Seikret pick-me-up is incredibly strong, almost rivaling the Wirebug recovery in Rise for letting you quickly get some distance and heal in relative safety.
The mobility and aggression in monster AI feels pretty comparable to World so far, with some design cues from Rise as well. The armored gorilla toad Chatacabra is a fun punching bag with heavily telegraphed attacks and plenty of staggers to exploit. Doshaguma, especially the larger alpha variant, feels like a much tamer version of Rise's Goss Harag – bear-like and prone to just smothering you with its mass between swipes of its claws. The ink-spitting leviathan Balahara is my pick for the most frustrating monster in the beta. It just will not hold still, and it constantly whips its head around as it seems to attack the ground behind you.
The top predator of the Windward Plains, the lightning wyvern Rey Dau, is the peak of the beta. Capcom nails the sound design once again. This thing is an alien railgun with wings, so it's only right that it sounds like God slamming a car door. It's a shame the quest itself is such a hassle. You initially have to find Rey Dau during intermittent lightning storms, one of the environment's many fluctuating weather conditions, whereas other monsters spawn all the time.
The standout in all of these fights is Focus Mode, a new means of aiming your attacks and destroying wounds that appear as you damage monsters. I like Focus Mode a lot more than I thought I would and it's quickly becoming embedded in my muscle memory, but I have found it's much more important for some weapons than others. Just hold the button to pull up a reticle, with no resource or time limit attached, and precisely aim your strikes. You can also briefly enter Focus to launch a unique attack that deals extra damage to wounds and triggers a slick follow-up animation for even more hits. You can pop wounds just by hitting them normally, but using Focus mode efficiently will make a big difference in your hunt times. It also makes tons of attacks easier to land, from lance counters to charge blade axe swings.
Beta pains
I've spent my beta time opening the map, surveying the monsters that are in town, and marking my next victim with a Seikret-guiding waypoint. I've done this instead of creating dedicated quests to reduce the chance of random players jumping in and, just to pull an example out of thin air, sabotaging my Rey Dau hunt by dying to the railgun attack and wiping the quest, forcing me to wait for another lightning storm for the umpteenth time. The normal hub quest flow isn't available to sample, sadly, and you're stuck in a recommended lobby with a bunch of other players. I guess it is a network test, after all.
That said, the seamlessness of these freeform expeditions is nice. Quests only start once you've hit your target monster, and you can just keep exploring after the hunt's over. This makes speed runs easier to track and it reduces downtime between hunts, at least in a back-to-back setting like this. It's like the aimless excursions in World but with a little more direction, and more loot from the looks of it. A quick trip to the nearest base camp, including several handy temporary ones, and I'm ready to go. I do miss the one-button item restock, though; if Wilds has one, I haven't found it. The UI is a bit messy altogether, which is one of my biggest problems so far. Unhelpful pop-ups clutter the screen and delay essential inputs like opening the freakin' map, while important details like weapon-specific bars and resources seem oddly tiny.
On PS5, Monster Hunter Wilds is treading a fine line between looking quite pretty on fidelity mode and being a bit flat and smeared on performance mode, which I still advise using to maintain a better frame rate. It is never ugly, but it is often less than gorgeous. I recommend bumping the saturation up a little; by default, it has a bit of the washed-out look that World did. We'll see how the PC beta looks and runs. I am not feeling optimistic given the ridiculous system requirements. The character models, at least, are the best in the series, with stunning detail put into the character creator as well as every NPC. But in all my setting scouring, I haven't found a way to make the UI less unwieldy.
The good, the bad, and the insect glaive
Some 1,100 words in, it's finally time to nerd out over the weapons. I've focused on my darlings – lance, hammer, charge blade, and insect glaive – but I've been keeping tabs on all 14. I'm hungry to try greatsword, which got an honest-to-goodness parry, and longsword, the perennial favorite. All of the ranged weapons seem absurdly imbalanced, as is Monster Hunter tradition. Sword and shield feels mostly unchanged from World, and strictly better if anything. Dual blades do be blading dually. Switch axe I probably know the least about, but everything I've seen is encouraging. Gunlance might be the biggest winner of all the weapons, with huge buffs to shelling and powerful additions to its normal attacks and guard options.
Capcom, if you're listening, you need to roughly quadruple the motion value on this
Most of my play time has been on lance, which feels strong but a touch unfamiliar. Thrust combos now lead into either a triple-thrust follow-up or a charged thrust which does double damage when you time it with a monster attack. The normal counter stance is gone, fully replaced by the heavy guard, but you can do a normal guard almost instantly after basically every attack, letting you weave in perfect guards that deal damage(!), apply stun value for decent KOs, and allow for ripostes.
As a diehard lance main, this counterattack is by far my biggest issue, and yes I'm giving it a whole paragraph. Capcom, if you're listening, you need to roughly quadruple the motion value on this thing. Just a straight-up 300% damage buff, and I'm not kidding. I think you forgot a zero in the scaling or something because my perfect guard riposte should not be dealing 24 measly damage when a normal attack does 18. This feels like when Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree added the Rain of Fire spell and it dealt like 11 damage to a deer.
I am, however, delighted to report that Wilds might have the best hammer ever. All of the staple attacks are back and now we have a Wirebug-esque dash that lets us dodge while preserving our charge. Stuns come pretty easy and every last bonk feels fantastic and probably has more follow-up options. Much the same is true of charge blade, which has a more rounded toolbox that's less reliant on ultra spam. Axe and sword mode feel a little less intertwined, but that's offset by more fluid axe combos, a much better phial economy, and quality-of-life buffs like a phial load that goes right into a shield charge.
Finally, the bad news: I don't like the new insect glaive at all. It's still early days, but the gameplay loop that I loved in Rise is just gone. The thrust opener is slower and weaker, aerial attacks were gutted, and the divebomb thrust is much harder to use and aim. Almost all of the weapon's power budget has been funneled into a whirlwind attack that pushes you to collect and burn all three kinsect buffs as quickly as possible, which is extremely boring to me. I don't play the famously nimble insect glaive to use stationary charged attacks. It just feels pigeonholed, so while I may be missing something, I'm hoping it gets significant changes before launch or I may drop it entirely.
As the first bite of a more direct follow-up to the breakout success that was Monster Hunter World, the first beta for Monster Hunter Wilds is promising. But it's by design too limited to really blow me away. It is Monster Hunter – this in and of itself is great news. Capcom would have to go out of its way to ruin the series' ironclad formula. Instead, Wilds looks to have meaningfully added to it. It just needs some breaking in. But after playing the beta, I'm even more desperate to play the full game, which is about the best takeaway possible for such a thin vertical slice.
Final Fantasy 14 devs would love to do a Monster Hunter Wilds collab: "There are many fans of the Monster Hunter series within the FF14 team, and I am one of them"
As Monster Hunter Wilds finally approaches, veteran dev says making a new monster "takes about one year," and that's not counting "small, detailed adjustments"
