I Can’t Wait To Play Monster Hunter Wilds And It’s Bumming Me Out
Monster Hunter Wilds landscape Rathalos
I’ve been a Monster Hunter fan for quite a long time. I started with the series back in 2009, shortly after the release of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite for the PSP, and I’ve either dabbled or been entirely consumed by just about every game in the series since. It’s a magnificent, wonderful series, and with the announcement of the next Monster Hunter game at The Game Awards, I got very excited, and then a bit sad.
Let’s talk about why I got excited, first. Monster Hunter blew the heck up in 2018 with the release of Monster Hunter World, a big, fresh start for the series that stripped away some of the more outdated frustrations and replaced them with modern comforts. It was a huge step up for Monster Hunter, showing that it wasn’t a series stuck in the past anymore — it was capable of evolving, growing, shining.
That evolution took another step with Monster Hunter Rise on the Nintendo Switch in 2021, which took things even further with a faster, more agile style of gameplay that injected a huge rush of adrenalin into a series already known for its high-impact combat. I’d lost myself in Monster Hunter games in the past, but none quite as much as Rise.
Capcom / Oliver Brandt
I played Rise for review, before most people in the world got the chance, and I sunk over 150 hours into it in the month prior to launch. After launch, teaming up with my friends and family, I put another 250 hours into it, and over the space of a year and a half, ended up finishing most of the content the game and its expansion had to offer, with only some of the more mundane quests remaining incomplete.
I loved Rise. I still do. And I had a really fun time with World, too. It was an absolute delight to see this series that I’d more or less grown up with finally grow up with me, and take big, bold steps into new frontiers.
So when I saw that Monster Hunter Wilds, the next game in the series, seemed to be borrowing DNA from both World and Rise, my heart began racing. “This could be it,” I thought, “This could be the definitive Monster Hunter experience.”
There’s no doubt that Wilds will have a lot of the forward-facing features that were present in both World and Wilds. It’s likely to have big, open areas filled with monsters and secrets, and vertical and horizontal traversal that surpasses anything before it. It’ll have new monsters, probably new weapons, and a whole bunch of ridiculous new outfits to craft and wear about, inefficient stat boosts be damned.
I absolutely can’t wait for it to be released, and it’s due in 2025 at some point. And that’s why I got a little bit sad. Not because I’m impatient and want it now – although I am, and I do – but because I literally can’t wait for it. Forgive me for getting a bit personal here, but there’s a very real chance that, in two years time, I won’t be able to play Monster Hunter at all anymore.
I have a degenerative tendon disorder that primarily affects the tendons in my hands and wrists. Sometimes it’s a little bit better, and sometimes it’s a little bit worse, but on the whole, over the last three years, it’s been a pretty steady decline. To be clear, I can still play games, I technically still have almost the full range of movement in my wrists and hands – at least right now – but specific movements, and the speed of those movements, can cause immense pain. And as the years have gone on, the amount of time it takes for that pain to kick in has shortened considerably.
Things started getting pretty bad when I was reviewing Monster Hunter Rise, in fact. It was a bit of a problem before then, but Rise really pushed me to my limits. As I said, I played 100 hours of Rise before the game launched, and when you start getting into the late-game, Rise gets demanding. Even people who are entirely physically able tell me they sometimes have to put the controller down after a long hunt to give their hands a rest.
Capcom
Towards the end of the review period, the pain became unbearable. I pushed through it, because I loved this game with all my heart, but once my review was written, the damage was evident. I had pain almost constantly, it was preventing me from sleeping, it was preventing me from typing, from working, sometimes even from comfortably using the bathroom.
It was awful, and it resulted in some minor surgery and a lot of anti-inflammatories to make things bearable again. It helped, for a while — but as I said, things have been on a steady decline. When playing games like Lies of P earlier this year, there were things I just couldn’t do. It’s an easier souls-y game than most, but I ultimately had to stop playing because my hands weren’t moving fast enough and my pain was just too much.
I haven’t played Monster Hunter Rise much at all this year. I played a little in February and March, and haven’t really touched it since. I’m a little afraid to do so, if I’m being honest, because when I did play back in March, I found myself barely able to get through a long hunt without starting to hurt. Now, I’m not sure I’d be able to finish a longer hunt. And by the time Wilds rolls around, I worry I won’t be able to finish any hunt at all.
It’s not the end of the road for my gaming journey, though. There are more surgeries to have, more medications to try. I can probably get another decade or so in before it’s totally game over. But if I want to make the most of my time, I need to be realistic about the kind of games I play, and try to avoid anything that will make things worse. Fast-paced monster hunting, I’m sad to say, will probably make things worse.
When Monster Hunter Wilds is released in 2025, I will probably buy it. I will probably try it. And I will probably find that it’s just not possible anymore. That’s a bit of a bummer, but that’s life for you. Sometimes you don’t get to do the things you love. I hope that accessibility controllers like the PlayStation Access and the Xbox Adaptive controller will provide the respite I need to keep playing, but there’s really no guarantee they will.
If you do pick up the game when it’s released, though, do me a favor — put on a silly outfit, inefficient stat boosts be damned, and send me a screenshot. We’ll both enjoy it much more that way.
