Monster Hunter producer says 'There are more players than ever playing on PC, including in Japan,' and that the series' handheld wilderness years prepared them for Wilds' day 1 PC launch and crossplay
Speaking with GamesRadar, Monster Hunter Wilds producer Ryozo Tsujimoto talked about Capcom's evolving stance toward PC gamers, and some of what it took to make Monster Hunter Wilds a simultaneous launch on all platforms with crossplay.
"There are more players than ever on PC, including in Japan," Tsujimoto said in response to a question about PC's increasing share of the overall gaming market and Japanese studios' recent efforts to better cater to PC gamers. "We definitely see room for the series to capture new players who haven't tried it before if that's their chosen platform.
"The choice is yours on which platform you want to play with, and then go online and hunt with your friends."
To that end, Wilds is not only the first entry in the series to release day and date on PC—World took an extra 8 months and Rise was initially a Switch exclusive—it's also the first entry to support full, platform-agnostic crossplay. Even major games like Fortnite, Destiny, and Baldur's Gate 3 struggled with the technical demands and obstinance on the part of platform owners this entails, with crossplay taking a long time to come to each of those games.
In another conversation with GamesRadar, Tsujimoto talked about how the team's experience with the earliest online console gaming and handhelds like the PSP prepared them for modern netwroking challenges like universal crossplay. "Even if you wanted to play the game, having a sufficient broadband connection and equipment to connect your console to the internet was not necessarily a given back then for most consumers," Tsujimoto recalled of the series' PlayStation 2 days.
Switching focus to the PSP and, eventually, Nintendo 3DS "kind of helped us deal with that lack of infrastructure, and in the meantime, infrastructure caught up," according to Tsujimoto. "The work we did on making the game work on portables with local networks really benefited the design of subsequent online games. So it definitely wasn't a diversion. It was more like just a realistic approach to catering to the needs of players given the limits of infrastructure at any given time."
Don't expect to play this one on a modern handheld like the Steam Deck, though, even with the series' on the go pedigree—Monster Hunter Wilds' benchmark has been utterly humbling our PCs. Monster Hunter Wilds releases on February 28.
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