Forget hunting: You should play the Monster Hunter Wilds beta this weekend to spend as much time as you want in the character creator

The second Monster Hunter Wilds beta is here and open to all, but if you played the first beta in late 2024 there's not a whole lot for you to do this time around. As explained in detail in our beta overview above, Capcom didn't update this beta build of the game with significant changes that are coming in the final release—crunchier hitstop and performance improvements, for example. There are a couple new monsters to fight, but with launch just three weeks away, is that reason enough to install the beta when fighting them will look and feel better in the final game?

I say: Nah, not really. But there's a much better reason to install the beta and boot it up this weekend. You can spend as much time as you want in Wilds' impressive character creator now, and jump straight into hunting come February 27.

The best thing about the Monster Hunter Wilds beta is that character creator saves transfer to the full game. It's the only part of the beta that's transferable: You won't get any credit for hunting the beta's monsters or get to keep any of the materials they drop. So why spend the time hunting when you can spend the time crafting your perfect hunter instead?

Wilds' character creator may not quite be up to the diabolical depth of, say, Inzoi, or Capcom's own Dragon's Dogma 2, which lets you remove individual teeth from your character's mouth. But it's still pretty great, and I'm quite pleased with my hunter after more than an hour of tinkering. Here are just some of the granular settings you can mess with:

• 45 hair types, with configurable length on some
• Hair base and accent color, with a gradient ratio and intensity affecting the balance between the two
• Skin texture, wrinkles, and blending
• Eye size, depth, height, separation, rotation, separate inner and outer corner heights, as well as upper and lower eyelid height, rotation, width and fold
• Teeth color and tweakable teeth stains
• 45 facial makeup/paint/scarring options with three layered slots to combine them in
• 16 beards and 11 mustaches, from your Abe Lincolns to your Sam Elliotts

As you'd expect there are also the usual suspects: Color pickers with granular hue, saturation and brightness sliders, separate left and right eye colors, and yet more sliders for your chin and mouth and face shape and positioning of facial features. I particularly like how creative you can get with the tattoo/scarring choices—because each pattern is adjustable on the X and Y axes, rotatable, and positionable anywhere on the face, you can wildly change these patterns from their default designs with a little patience and creativity.

Or you can crank up the luminosity to make your character look radioactive.

If there's one obvious thing missing here, it's the ability to make your hunter particularly big or small—there's no height option at all, and even maxed muscle mass looks pretty damn fit. Given the quantity of armor in Monster Hunter, I'm not really surprised by the limitations on body type.

I think the voice options are also a bit of a letdown: there are six to freely choose from, which is decent, but the option to tweak the pitch of each voice up or down ends up making them sound robotic. Maybe that was unavoidable, but the option is kind of a bust as a result.

After getting through character creation you'll still get to (or have to) design your palico companion, with plenty of customization choices around their fur coloring and patterns and ears and tails. If I were doing all this character creation on launch day, I'd probably feel fully done with the process by the time I perfected my character and then phone in my palico. But doing it now, during the beta, I had zero urge to rush through. I recommend getting cozy with a big mug of tea and getting your hunter and palico juuuuust right.

This stretch of the Monster Hunter Wilds open beta is available until 7 pm on February 9, but Capcom's bringing it back for an encore next weekend from February 13-16, too. Then it'll be just over a week 'til the full game.

If you do want to do a little hunting after all that character creation, check out our tips for taking on the beta's monsters (we've got more on the way!)

• Monster Hunter Wilds: Doshaguma guide
• Monster Hunter Wilds: Gypceros guide
• Monster Hunter Wilds: Rey Dau guide
• Monster Hunter Wilds: Chatacabra guide