The Next Monster Hunter Game Announced At The Game Awards
Monster Hunter Wilds landscape Rathalos
The Game Awards are over now, but they ended with a huge announcement — a brand-new Monster Hunter game. It’s called Monster Hunter Wilds, and while it won’t be out for quite some time, it’s already looking to be quite incredible.
The trailer for the new game opens on some very spiky-looking armadillo-like creatures, straddling a riverbank in the desert, before cutting away to a quick montage of other creatures living their lives in this desolate wasteland. There’s a rumbling in the distance, and we see a hunter atop a very strange bird-dog creature — our protagonist, and what you’ll be doing when the game eventually launches.
The hunter and its steed sprints through the desert, while being chased by a raging sandstorm and some very large creatures. We see a bit of platforming from the steed – it turns out it can fly, which is wild – and then a huge wave of lush green spreads across the land. We pan up and the title appears on the screen: Monster Hunter Wilds.
A Rathalos flies past, and then we see the sad part — the next Monster Hunter game won’t be launching until 2025. That’s a bit of a bummer, honestly, but it’s Monster Hunter, and there’s no rushing genius.
Monster Hunter Wilds is a follow-up to two games, Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise. The former launched on PS4 and Xbox One in 2018 and quickly became the best-selling game in the series, while the latter was a Switch exclusive for a year before coming to PC and eventually PlayStation and Xbox, selling a respectable amount of copies across all platforms too.
We can see DNA from both games in here, with the faster-paced gameplay afforded by the speedy mount, like in Rise, and the big, open plains of World. It looks a little more like Rise than World to my eyes, but there’s no denying that it’s got a bit of both in there.
So far, Monster Hunter Rise is scheduled to launch on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam, but given the release window of 2025, we wouldn’t be surprised to see it on the Nintendo Switch’s successor too, which is widely believed to be launching sometime in 2024. We’ll have to wait and see.
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