Summary
- Monster Hunter Wilds focuses on making in-game food look appetizing with exaggerated realism.
- Players can dine anywhere in the game, creating a camping grill atmosphere instead of a restaurant theme.
- The game will feature a wide variety of dishes, including a secret "extravagant" meat dish, enhancing food-related bliss.
Monster Hunter Wilds is looking to raise the bar for delicious-looking in-game food, according to two of the top members of its development team. Food in Monster Hunter Wilds will consist of a wide array of meat, fish, and vegetable dishes, and the developers have been putting a lot of effort into making them as savory-looking as possible, even going beyond what's realistic to do so.
Cooking has been a part of the Monster Hunter franchise since its first game in 2004, when players could chow down on big hunks of meat from monsters they had slain. That mechanic has continued throughout the franchise's history, with its benefits becoming increasingly important and its list of meals and ingredients expanding. But starting in 2018, food in Monster Hunter World became a much larger focus than before, with the developers doing their best to provide realistic dining experiences with meals that players would actually want to eat.
Why Is Monster Hunter Wilds Tagged as a Dating Sim?
Monster Hunter Wilds has been tagged as a dating sim on Steam for over six months now, thanks to players' affection for one of the game's characters.
That trend looks to be pushed even further when Monster Hunter Wilds launches on February 28, 2025, according to executive director/art director Kaname Fujioka and director Yuya Tokuda, who feel that there aren't many games on the market that feature food that actually looks appetizing. "Making it look realistic isn't enough to make it look good," Fujioka said in a recent video interview with IGN. "You really have to think about what makes something look delicious." That requires a mix of realism and exaggeration, with the inspirations from the latter coming from food in anime and commercials, including special lighting effects and exaggeration of food models.
Monster Hunter Wild Devs Use Exaggerated Realism in Cooking Scenes
Unlike in some previous Monster Hunter games, players in Monster Hunter Wilds will be able to dine anywhere, with cooking taking on more of a camping grill feel as opposed to a restaurant theme. While an immaculate cheese pull from a Monster Hunter Wilds preview in December has already tantalized fans, there are some other notable inclusions on the menu. Even a simple meal like roasted cabbage, which provided a big challenge for Fujioka, can be appealing with an effect that includes it realistically puffing up as the lid is removed from the pan, he noted, and an accompanying video also shows the half-head of cabbage dressed up with a roasted egg covering the top.
On the other side of the menu, Tokuda, who has a much stronger affinity for meat in Monster Hunter as well as in real life, teased that the game will be introducing a secret "extravagant" meat, though he contained his excitement before revealing what it is. In all, the game looks to focus on a wide variety of dishes, as well as the expressions that people make while dining around a cooking fire, to pack an exaggerated sense of realistic food-related bliss into its cooking cutscenes.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 89 /100 Critics Rec: 95%
WHERE TO PLAY
The unbridled force of nature runs wild and relentless, with environments transforming drastically from one moment to the next. This is a story of monsters and humans and their struggles to live in harmony in a world of duality.
Fulfill your duty as a Hunter by tracking and defeating powerful monsters and forging strong new weapons and armor from the materials you harvest from your hunt as you uncover the connection between the people of the Forbidden Lands and the locales they inhabit.
The ultimate hunting experience awaits you in Monster Hunter Wilds.
- Engine
- RE Engine
- Multiplayer
- Online Multiplayer, Online Co-Op
- Cross-Platform Play
- Yes, all platforms
- Cross Save
- No
- Franchise
- Monster Hunter
- Number of Players
- 1
- Steam Deck Compatibility
- Unknown
- PC Release Date
- February 28, 2025
- Xbox Series X|S Release Date
- February 28, 2025
- PS5 Release Date
- February 28, 2025
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
- X|S Optimized
- Yes
