Monster Hunter Wilds was awash in difficulty discourse before it even launched. Prerelease reviews drove the Monster Hunter subreddit into a panic, as critics forced excited hunters to ask that most terrible of questions: What if the new Monster Hunter was too easy?
Before jumping into Wilds’ highest strength hunts, I carted a single time in the entirety of Low Rank and High Rank. So yes, I’ve been having a pretty easy go. But after watching veteran hunters say World—and Rise, and just about every other Monster Hunter release over the last 14 years—was too easy, I have to ask: If that’s a conversation we have to have, why are we doing it now?
The last Monster Hunter games have had years-long lifecycles of post-release support, with free updates and paid expansions adding new challenges. In the year following World’s release, patches added endgame challenges that subjected hunters to Deviljho predations and Lunastra firestorms.
The release of Arch-Tempered monsters left swaths of hunters terrorized by the lightning-charged equine violence courtesy of AT Kirin. Then, the Iceborne expansion brought Master Rank—the modern reincarnation of G-Rank difficulty from older, portable Monster Hunter games, where monsters are universally more aggressive and punishing.
Likewise, Rise’s pre-expansion updates dropped a roster of Apex monsters and elder dragons. Once Sunbreak hit, when players weren’t being treated to a parade of amped up variant Master Rank creatures, they could battle through a brutal escalating endgame of vampiric Afflicted monsters.
There was a reason I didn’t mention difficulty in our Wilds review, and it’s because my brain is terminally addled with Monster Hunter worms. I’ve been mainlining Master Rank hunts for years. Acting like my sense of Monster Hunter’s difficulty is in line with the general populace would be professional malpractice.
When I close my eyes, I see images of detonating Zero Sum Discharges on mid-air Teostras. By the time new players might’ve figured out how cooking works in Wilds, I had separate fine-tuned item loadouts, bespoke radial menu setups, and a hunting wishlist suited for my specific gameplay tastes. I am an outlier and should not be counted. I am Hunters Georg.
Is wound destruction currently too effective? Almost certainly. The massive damage and guaranteed monster staggers are basically begging for a patch to increase monster part durability. And we might see one; hunters who were playing World at launch might remember the brief launch period where Slicing Ammo was dropping monsters left and right before a patch a couple weeks later brought it within reasonable parameters.
But I’m confident that for every player who’s cracked how to steamroll monsters with Focus Strikes, there are still just as many trying to wrap their heads around Monster Hunter’s brick wall of assembled systems.
Understanding Monster Hunter is like assembling a puzzle. It’s a pile of seemingly mismatched pieces, and if you pick any one of them it’s not immediately clear what you’re looking at until you try to fit it together with something else.
Skills that maintain weapon sharpness make more sense once you learn that each additional sharpness tier provides a percent increase to damage. Quick Sheath and Draw skills transform entirely once it clicks that they interact with the long sword’s iai attacks. I guarantee that if I write the words “affinity is just critical hit chance” here, a few people reading this will go “Ohhhhhhh.”
More than the challenge of any individual monster, what attracted me to Monster Hunter was that gradual, piece-by-piece understanding of an arcane puzzle—the mapping out of all the curious bits of armor skills, monster behaviors, and weapon combos until they eventually snap together into a delightful rhythm of toppling dragons with well-placed hammer swings.
That puzzle’s still there. I’ve just already internalized what newer hunters are feeling out now.
In World and Rise, Low Rank and High Rank as they arrived at launch weren’t for pushing veteran players to their limits—they were prepping less seasoned hunters for the higher difficulty hunts in the free updates and paid expansions that follow. If you need to decide whether Monster Hunter Wilds is too easy, you’re better off making that call in two years.
