Capcom is punishing me for wanting to play Monster Hunter Wilds with my friends

When Monster Hunter Wilds finally launched at the tail end of February, I was excited to finally start teaming up with my buddies to hasten the extinction of every large animal we encountered. I had big dreams, full of murder and chopped off tails. Capcom had other ideas.

I've never had a good experience trying to team up with pals in a Monster Hunter game, but in this era of live-service dominance I foolishly thought that Capcom might have actually tried to make some improvements. But nope, that's not our Capcom!

Instead, it's added more layers of bullshit seemingly in an attempt to obfuscate one of the game's best features—to the point that trying to simply start a multiplayer game requires a bunch of research and experimentation. Enough so that when you finally do get to start slaughtering a bunch of fauna, you've probably had enough of this terrible system.

You could be forgiven for assuming that joining a lobby with your friend would mean you could start adventuring together, especially since it's given pride of place in the main menu. If you join a lobby with folk, that means you want to play with them, right? So when my friend and I fired up the game, naturally we created a private lobby, expecting that to be the end of it.

We were so naive. Lobbies are, in fact, weird places that sort of facilitate multiplayer shenanigans, but only in a very regimented way. Joining a lobby means you can see some players in the camp, but the moment you leave the camp you are effectively in your own instance. When you embark on a quest, though, other members of the lobby can see the quest via the quest menu, and then choose to join it, transporting them to your instance.

I can't think of a single reason why anyone would only want to hang out with other hunters back at camp, where you can't actually do anything together. And it's similarly baffling that a group of friends in a lobby together can't just go on a quest without going through additional steps.

To make things worse, my co-op buddy couldn't actually see me in the camp anyway. I could see him, but I was invisible. I just stood there, trying to make him look at my hideous palico chum, but to no avail. And when we realised there were all these other lobby limitations, we realised that this was not the co-op experience we were looking for.

As we tried to figure out why I was invisible, we noticed some more bullshit: link parties. These are entirely separate from lobbies and let you party up with groups of friends—even if you're in different lobbies. Surely this is what we're looking for, we thought, like a pair of idiots.

Link parties, it turns out, also really suck. You do not consistently play together, forcing you to instead wait for a party member to initiate a quest, at which point you'll be invited to join said quest. It's basically the same as a lobby, except you don't need to visit Alma to help your friend on their latest adventure—you get sent a notification instead. Truly a revolution in accessibility.

Regardless of what method you're using to try to play with other people, one thing is always true: it's a total nightmare if you're trying to do story quests—which is what most players are doing right now.

So when my friend embarked upon a new quest when we were linked, nothing happened at all. Instead I hung around waiting, and waiting, and waiting, until he finally encountered the quest's monster, and only then did I get a notification, finally allowing me to actually join him—rushing from my camp to the battleground while he duked it out alone.

Again, this is incredibly bad. Just awful, awful design. Instead of being able to play together, one of us was always left feeling like back up—the cavalry waiting in the wings until they are needed. As my friend described everything he was doing, I was just twiddling my thumbs instead of sharing his adventure.

Hidden away in the menu is yet another option, though: environment links. Finally, we thought, a way for us to properly play together, just a couple of good buddies roaming around the environment together. This should be the default option, not hidden away until you figure out that you need to use a link party and not a lobby. Or at least it would have been a good default option if it wasn't, like all the multiplayer options in this cursed game, absolutely shit.

See, while an environment link does allow you explore the wilderness together, that's all it lets you do. You can roam around and fight random monsters, but that's the full extent of it. If you want to do quests and investigations together, you'll need to end the environment link and go back to waiting around in camp.

Who wants this? A co-op option where you can't make meaningful progress, and where you need to turn the option off if you actually want to participate in quests, after which you find yourself stymied by different limitations.

So there's no way to just play together seamlessly. And there's no reason why it should be like this. If you combined the capabilities of each discrete multiplayer system, you'd have a normal, comprehensive way of enjoying some good old fashioned co-op. All the mechanics are there, but they're currently forced apart and laden with unnecessary limitations.

All Capcom has done is create a whole bunch of convoluted systems that can't do the one thing most co-op groups actually want. On top of all these options, there's also squads, which are essentially clans which can play together in a squad lobby, which has all the limitations of a regular lobby; and SOS flares, which let you request help from other hunters who are browsing the appropriate menu, even if you're not in a lobby.

This is at least twice the number of systems that you actually need, all of them overlap each other, and alone none of them remotely feel serviceable. For a series that's this long in the tooth, so focused on multiplayer, and competing with countless games that make multiplayer completely seamless, this isn't just bad. It's unacceptable.

Ultimately, this is a fundamentally broken system that makes Monster Hunter Wilds a very poor experience for anyone who's not just wanting to fight monsters with randos. I've put up with a lot of bullshit over the years when it comes to multiplayer—I still vividly remember the hours spent forwarding ports and mucking around with firewalls just so I can play with some pals. But at least in those instances, after all the faffing around was done, we'd actually be able to properly team up. Capcom wants you to waste your time faffing around with no real rewards at the end.

For groups of friends who want to genuinely play together, I'd honestly recommend giving Monster Hunter Wilds a miss. Which is a shame, because it's otherwise a brilliant game that's even better when you're slaughtering the wildlife with your pals.