A Hunt Divided
With Capcom looking to expand their reach in the PC games market, it should come as no surprise that Monster Hunter: Rise will be getting a PC port soon. Previous entries like Monster Hunter World did very well on PC, so fans came to have the expectation that they’d be able to experience all of Rise’s new features over there. And, they totally can, but there’s a catch. The PC version of the game will not support cross-platform play, and you won’t be able to transfer save data between platforms. If you have a PC and your hunting partner has a Switch, you might as well be playing wholly different games.
No concrete explanation was given for this move, but whatever it was, it must’ve been a tough barrier to cross. The official Monster Hunter twitter account had to put out a statement that disappointed many of its players:
We’ve heard your requests for Cross-Save / Cross-Play for #MHRise & #Sunbreak, but unfortunately, after looking into it throughout the development process, we found we are unable to implement it this time. As always, we appreciate your continued feedback and support.
— Monster Hunter (@monsterhunter) October 11, 2021
It’s certainly not due to a hardware limitation, cross-platform play and save-data transfers have existed for Switch/PC games in the past. Divinity: Original Sin 2 could do this no problem, and Warframe will be doing something similar in the coming months. So while we have some clues to work off of, the broader truth remains obscured.
Understandably, a move like this has led to many players asking a lot of questions. Speculation and theories are numerous, but the general consensus among them is that Nintendo‘s to blame. One reply to the twitter post stated: “Nintendo has a long history of being deathly afraid of modding and community content for their games. They probably saw it as a loophole for modders and said “hell nah”. While such an explanation seems plausible, that’s all it’ll be until an official source comes out.