It’s been nearly three months since the release of Monster Hunter: World, and its Capcom development team is still hard at work adding new monsters and creating the PC version. And in a recent Gamespot interview, director Yuya Tokuda answered burning questions about the series and its future.
Tokuda went deep into what it’s like to approach the series in a way that makes it accessible to a bigger audience.
“Each game has its own targets and goals and we work towards them, and accessibility and ease of play was a big focus for us on World,” he said. “Moving forward with the series I want to make sure we continue to focus on accessibility but not at the expense of depth–I don’t ever want players to feel like we’ve moved backward.”
“I wanted to evolve the three key pillars of Monster Hunter: action, multiplayer and the gameplay loop,” he added. “But I wanted to make sure all players could get far enough to fully appreciate those things, so I knew we had to take a look at which parts of the game were hard to understand or too difficult, and revise them–again, without losing depth–or remove them as needed.”
“The controls were a particularly big challenge, as were difficult-to-understand game systems and the challenge of how to tutorialise them. The difficulty curve was also something that needed work to make it more accommodating [for] new players while providing a satisfying challenge to veterans.”
Of course, despite being more approachable, the game possesses a great deal of mystery that makes players just want to dive in and explore it. Tokuda explored the difficulty of balancing this approachability with mystery.
“It was very tricky. At its heart the game is about exploration and discovery–you learn how to hunt monsters and you also get to the bottom of the mystery in the storyline,” he said. “Showing off too much of either would potentially rob players of the joy of discovering these things for themselves, and the sense of achievement and growth they get during the game.”
“I also wanted players to share this kind of information with each other using multiplayer to communicate,” he continued. “I think overall we achieved a good balance, and you can see that in the many players uploading and streaming their own best gameplay moments and discoveries. But there has been a limit on how much information sharing players can carry out in multiplayer, leaving some to perhaps give up on progressing in the game as they don’t know enough. That’s something I want to keep in mind for the future so we can better plan for that.”
Tokuda and his team are currently working on the PC version, which he says is being released this fall. Until then, you can play Monster Hunter: World on PS4 or Xbox One.