Girls and boys, go to Uncle Capcom’s garage, because it’s time to interfere with the cat’s larynx, ride a fighting peacock and painstakingly injure a huge, fat teddy bear. I mean the beta version of Monster Hunter Wilds, which will be available on Steam until November 4, 2:59 GMT. It’s 2:59 a.m. If you’re in a hurry at 3 a.m. on a Monday and are absolutely desperate to perfect the little captive cat aesthetic, you might want to give it a rest and play Dragon Age: The Veilguard instead.
To celebrate, Capcom has released Steam Getting Started Guide this is so detailed that playing the open beta is absolutely unnecessary, ho ho, kid, Capcom, please put down the huge sword. To summarize, the open beta allows you to create a Palico character and assistant. It gives you access to a story trial where you’ll be able to experiment with 14 different weapons and unleash destruction on a helpless trainer dummy, along with a Doshaguma hunt that will take you to the Windy Plains in search of the relatively resistant furry mammal for slaughter. While you’re outdoors, you can go crazy with one of the following up-to-date Wilds features:
– Focus mode! This is a up-to-date magical vision skill that allows you to see the wounds of monsters. However, they do not look like wounds. They look like glowing tender spots because it’s a Capcom game. Imagine if Mortal Kombat did it this way.
– Drive your Seikret! This is the aforementioned fighting peacock. I don’t want to mix up my analogies/metaphors, but it’s also a backpack with a bag for supplies and the ability to switch between two sets of gear while riding on top. What’s more, you can sharpen your weapon while flying on your fighter, and it even has an automatic drive function. They could have saved some of the animation budget and just replaced it with a Toyota Yaris.
– Camping! You can now ask a Palico friend to set up a tent where you can bask, cook, change gear, or simply relax like a prince. However, be careful that Monsters may come and sit on it. A flock of sheep once did this to me in darkest North Yorkshire. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a Toyota Yaris back then.
– Kill Rey Dau! There are tons of monsters in the beta. The rarest of them is the dragon that lives in the storm. I saw Alpha Doshagumy battle one of them at Summer Game Fest. Things didn’t go well for Alpha Doshagum. It turns out that in Mother Nature’s great game of roshambo, lightning lizards > furry farts.
– Witness the changing weather! We have several seasons to choose from, and they all seem to be named by moderately religious poets. Disorder is an “ecologically altering event that comes as a raging storm” – beware of lightning, whether you are a hunter or a monster. Fallow is “a period of scarcity when hungry predators roam the land in search of food”, while Plenty is a time of bountiful map resources and smaller fauna. I can’t see any other option for Wearitude, a British season that somehow combines the heat of summer with the chilly of winter and is rife with wasps that refuse to die, hibernate, or whatever else they do when they’re not attacking my sandwiches.
– Alternatively, turn off spiders! I’m not sure if the Wilds beta includes arachnids, but in the full game you can turn them into slimes, although they’ll still move like spiders, which is probably worse.
Speaking of the full version of Monster Hunter Wilds, it will be released on February 28, 2025, and your character and Palico from the beta version will be carried over. So there’s no reason not to overdo it. Unfortunately I won’t be playing because my brother is in town and we’ll be busy hunting down the biggest prize: an inexpensive non-Dominos pizza in London. Say hello to Doshaguma for me.
