A New Challenger Appears to Take Down Monster Hunter
Monster Hunter has grown into a gaming giant in these past few years, with Monster Hunter World rocketing the game into the western market and Rise giving it a firm anchor. Others have risen to the challenge – Dauntless comes to mind – though none have managed to dethrone the king.
The war to create an apex-predator in the monster fighting space is a cutthroat one. But according to some reports, Xbox thinks Certain Affinity is up to the task.
In case you haven’t heard of them, Certain Affinity has been in the shadows of some of the platform’s greatest hits. They’ve made significant contributions to the Halo franchise ever since 2011, working on everything from Halo: Reach to Halo: the Master Chief Collection. And that’s just one of many projects.
The rumors come to us through Jeff Grubb, a journalist for GamesBeat that claims to have some insider knowledge. “They’re working with Certain Affinity on what seems like a Monster Hunter style game – a Monster Hunter clone,” Grubb said. “They see this gameplay style succeeding, and Microsoft’s like, ‘hey, we should try to make one of those, is anyone out there going to pitch one?’”
Grubb also commented that this move was intended to diversify the offerings on Xbox Game Pass. In Microsoft’s mind, striking a deal with Capcom to put Monster Hunter on there would be ‘too expensive’. It’d be cheaper to just make their own game.
A while back there was also an announcement from Certain Affinity that might be related to this. They revealed that the company was working on a new IP, though didn’t specify further. It’s possible that Certain Affinity could be working on two projects at once, though Occam’s Razor makes this new theory a lot easier to believe.