Monster Hunter Wilds vs World as a Newcomer

Back in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic I tried playing Monster Hunter World. I did not get it or really enjoy it much. I found it confusing, annoying, and non-communicative for how to properly play it. When I played it with a friend who hadn’t played a ton of Monster Hunter games in the past I got angry that I had killed a monster 3 times and still not gotten the piece I needed for a weapon. So I gave up on it as I didn’t want to do all that grinding.

Fast forward to the now and I’ve got a partner who loves Monster Hunter and some friends who have been up for playing it which means I was playing World with one group and my partner (we stopped playing, but more on that later) and then I am still playing Wilds with another group and, separately, my partner. As such I’m seeing these games side by side, I’m seeing the improvements, the negatives, the jank, the annoying BS that leads far beyond negative, and most importantly I’m seeing why people love the series.

My partner guided me through playing it for a while and now I just have fun playing Wilds even by myself. It’s a wonderful experience and I know how to actually do stuff. More so, I’m loving experimenting with different weapons and all that. It’s great fun. Then, with World I had a fun time playing with that group of people and seeing the Monster Hunter that is still somehow more popular than Wilds. I also saw what I was missing all the way back in 2020.

All of this has given me many, many thoughts about both games and how they compare and since I write on here once a week I figured why not go over those thoughts. So today, we are comparing Monster Hunter World and Wilds. I’m going to go over how Wilds improves on everything World set out to make, how World still has some stuff going for it, and what game I think, a Monster Hunter newbie like myself, should play. Time to get on the Hunt!

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Prior to World, the Monster Hunter series wasn’t really mainstream. Sure it had its dedicated fans who adored it but it was incredibly hard to get into as a newcomer who wanted something less complicated. This dedicated fan base kept the series going but it didn’t lead to much growth, but then Monster Hunter World happened.

The game came with a bunch of more simplistic changes as well as simply being the highest budget in the series and the first on PC. More so, this game was a phenomenon for a while. People who had never considered playing a Monster Hunter game picked it up and either adored it or at least enjoyed their time with it. They became fans. World expanded the fanbase all because it made changes that would likely ruffle some feathers, but made with the goal of making the game far more accessible. This success was unexpected and it lead a lot of people to wonder what the next big Monster Hunter would change to continue the path towards being more accessible.

When Wilds came out it was the biggest Monster Hunter Launch ever. People adored World so were ecstatic to play what came next. Unfortunately it took a while to actually be able to play it because it wasn’t optimized at all so people would buy it and not be able to even progress past the first little area because of how fucked it was. Yet, once the dust settled and the optimization happened people started to see what I’ve been seeing. Some liked it, some hated it.

To put it simply, Wilds is the most accessible Monster Hunter yet. Capcom managed to take all of the positive things they did in World and actually expand on them. They managed to introduce new things to the formula that allowed you as a player to adapt more easily. They did a fantastic job creating a game that wasn’t just the followup to World (technically there was another one in between but that was originally switch exclusive before being ported over so I’m not really counting it), but an evolution of it.

World was still kinda stuck in the clunky weapon movement of the past. Wilds made it much easier. See, World, and all prior MH games before Wilds, requires you to perfect not just your combos, where to hit on the monster, or avoiding the attacks. They required you to “get gud” at making your attacks actually happen in the direction of the enemy. Basically, you can be attacking but the enemy might be a bit too to the left or right of your weapon so you’d miss. No matter what in order to hit you always had to be at the exact right point. Not inherently a problem, but weapons have combos so if the monster moves during that combo (which they did all the time) the second half of it could be facing the wrong direction because the big guy moved. Or if you’re running to be next to the monster but attack before turning to face them then you’ll attack where you are currently facing. Attacks were incredibly precise and you had to be able to adjust at a moments notice.

That sounds interesting of course but in practice it’s just fucking exhausting for a newbie. I was constantly finding myself trying to attack the monster and just missing because I was facing the wrong direction or they had moved during my combo. It sucked.

But Wilds said “okay, if you want you can still deal with that, but you could also use the new Focus mode that will attack in whatever direction the camera is facing” which is a feature that changes the damn game. It took an annoying clunky feeling of the core game, and made it much more fluid and fun. Now if the monster moves slightly when you’re in focus mode you can just move the camera to adjust and make sure the attack still hits. This is a feature that ruffled some feathers, a lot of people in the core community thought it made the game too easy. The thing is that it just isn’t necessary to use. It’s there if you want. On PC I personally set it to a toggle with my Steam Controller so I can always be in focused mode during combat and it makes the gameplay feel so much less clunky. So this one feature makes the whole core aspect of fighting in Wilds that much more accessible. But there’s more than just that.

Specifically, let’s focus on the problem with World that killed my groups desire to continue playing it. The multiplayer. The Monster Hunter games are the weirdest multiplayer games I’ve personally ever played because they’re definitely a multiplayer game, but they really don’t want you to think they are. World exemplifies this perfectly. The problem is that in order to play missions together everyone has to have watched the cutscene for that mission, at least if there is one, and then they have to quit and join one of the other people that have also watched that cutscene. Or people have to be ahead of you then when you are done with it they join you. Joining is also far more complex with two different separate menus for when you’re joining a quest or when you’re “posting” (creating a quest that is joinable) a quest.

This wouldn’t be that big of a bother if the cutscene was only the intro. The problem is that often times you actually have to track to the monster to get the cutscene so it’ll take a long time for people to be able to get to the point where friends can join. For instance, when you get to the 3rd area of World, the last area my group got to, you start with a mission where you have to track a monster but that monster is very illusive. They don’t give you a ton of information of where to look and you can’t really find any tracks or anything and you will consistently come across other monsters that meet a similar description and has audio about hunting or tracking down so you might think it’s the right monster but it isn’t so you’re left just wandering by yourself instead of playing with your friends. This lead to three of us trying to find the monster until 2 of us finally had and then the third had to share her screen so we could guide her where to go. This literally took 30 minutes. Now, sure, exploration is fun, but when it’s supposed to be a multiplayer game and you’re stuck just running around trying to finally be able to play with your friends it fucking sucks. This just killed all interest in playing it for my group. It was exhausting finally getting to the point where we can play together.

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Meanwhile, Wilds solved some of this. It didn’t solve it entirely because, you do still have to get to the cutscene to be able to have friends join, but that cutscene is almost always mere minutes and often is just the opening cutscene. The only time where it’s not is when it’s introducing you to a new area. So the game feels smoother even if there is still some annoying fear that Monster Hunter seems to have of being a true Co-op game. On the plus side it did merge the menus for posting and joining quests. World also desperately doesn’t want you to see your friends in the main hub, you’re only able to see them in the “Gathering Hub” that is incredibly tiny compared to the actual hub. Wilds, meanwhile, lets you see your friends everywhere. Every area has a camp and you can see your friends at each one. It feels much more fun being able to see them while you’re just chilling in the camp for the area. The game just feels more like a multiplayer experience than World.

There are also plenty more small things that Wilds improved over World like how you can be wandering around one of the maps in Wilds, find a monster, start attacking it, then once a certain amount of damage has been done the game with automatically pick up the quest to kill that monster. In World if you found that monster then you could attack it and kill it and have never picked up or completed the quest for killing it so if you wanted to complete that quest then you’d have to go back to the main hub, and then start the quest. It sucks. Or like how the map is just all around better in Wilds because it’s more detailed and easier to mess around with, even if World is far more stylized (video comparing the two above).

All of this makes for this feeling that World made some big changes but that they were literally only step 1 on the path to being far more accessible of a franchise. Wilds then did the next several steps itself with making it more multiplayer friendly, the combat better, and several other changes that I will eventually talk about in my review of it sometime soon. Overall though Wilds just felt more like a game that was meant to be a smooth experience, while World felt like a game still banking on people dealing with all the jank of the series because “without the jank it isn’t Monster Hunter”.

Okay I know I’ve been saying that Wilds is just all around an improvement on World but I still think there are some good things in World. A lot of people like that in World you feel much more like a Hunter since it has a tracking mechanic where finding footprints or fur/feathers or scratches on trees make it easier to find the monster. Some people like that the combat is more difficult to get used to because they think that them already being used to it and having gone through the growing pains means that others should have to as well. Some think that having a mount in Wilds with the ability to auto-track the monster makes the maps too easy to navigate so you won’t learn them while World doesn’t have any of that.

Me though? I think the thing I did like about World is the vibe. Mainly I liked that feeling of having a massive fight against a single monster. See, in World you’re tracing after this massive mountain of a monster and there are missions where you and an expedition are fighting it in some large setpiece of a battle. There’s a really cool moment just before I stopped playing with my group where you fight on the back of that big monster. It’s a kickass moment and feels grander than most fights in Wilds. World has this vibe of carving your own path, of going into an unknown region and fucking up the monsters in the area.

Vibe wise I also think the main hub feels a lot grander with its multiple levels. Eventually in Wilds you do get to something at least similar to the World hub but it’s not quite as grand. In some ways the smaller spaces in Wilds is better, but it’s just a very different vibe to World.

I realize I’m mostly talking about vibes and stuff but there is one more thing that makes World better to play. It needs less to run. Even with the optimization that has helped Wilds run far better than it did at launch it still has higher required specs that World. Those higher requirements come with a lot of improved things like graphics but also just design wise the whole game looks better. But that does mean that people with lower spec machines will not be able to run the game. One of the people who was in that group who I played World with tried playing Wilds on her PC but because it was already not super high spec laptop, the game ran like absolute trash. That’s something that’s not surprising, when you have older tech not everything will run on it, especially laptops, but it is disappointing. Especially with the price of PC components right now.

So World does have some things going for it, even if most of those things aren’t better necessarily but more of a matter of taste.

This one is easy for me but has an asterisk. Play Wilds. Wilds has so much going for it, it’s got better gameplay, it’s got better multiplayer integration, it’s got better Monster design, it’s got less annoying monsters, it’s got truly outstanding armor and weapons designs, it’s got far more approachable world and quest design, and it’s got just an all around better story (World barely has much of a story besides tracking that big mountain monster). Wilds made me like the experience of playing Monster Hunter, World made me annoyed with how it kept me from playing with my friends. Wilds is also just genuinely a better game even if some people will say the opposite because of some of the more accessible changes to the games design.

But about that asterisk. If you are like my friend who has a lower spec machine, then your best bet is World. It’s still a solid game. It’s still fun, particularly if you are playing with people who are ahead of you in the story so they can just join you when you get to that cutscene requirement for each mission. It will run far better on dated hardware because it’s a dated game. One that a lot of people still play because of it still running and having a ton of content for. Also if you are gonna play World, get the expansion Iceborne. It comes with a grappling hook thing that will let you grab onto Monsters from afar and fly at them making fights where the monster is moving around a lot far far easier.

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So yeah, overall, I think playing these two games side by side for the time I did was an interesting experience. I don’t know if I want to go back and continue playing World by myself, Wilds kinda fills almost all of my wants for a Monster Hunter game and does so in a way that I fully intend to detail further in my eventual review. World, meanwhile, sits unplayed since that group got so damn exasperated by the jank. Jank can be fun for some people. I don’t personally understand liking the jank, it seems more just fucking annoying to me, but hey, people like what they like.

But what about you? Have you played World or Wilds or both? What did you think? If you prefer World, why? If you agreed with me that Wilds is better, why? And most importantly, if you played Wilds did you let your Palico speak normal language or stick with kitty meows? Seriously, that is the most important question here, I made my Palico speak normal language and I still can’t tell if I like it or not.

Meow,

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