Monster Hunter Wilds is a fantastic entry in the Monster Hunter franchise, a resounding success for the developers both commercially and critically. However, it also failed when it comes to fixing arguably the worst thing about the series and its biggest barrier to entry for new players.
As a series, Monster Hunter isn’t exactly known for being beginner-friendly. World, Rise, and now Wilds have made some real strides in making the game playable without investing a ton of time into learning strange game systems and bizarre control layouts for combat. This makes the game’s record-breaking player count even more surprising.
However, there’s one place where the series is still hurting. And, in this aspect, Wilds is arguably worse than prior entries like Rise and World: The UI and menus.
Moreso than any other aspect of the series, the game’s bloated UI is a massive turn-off for new players. And Monster Hunter Wilds is arguably worse than past entries in the series despite being more beginner friendly in almost every other aspect.
So far, the greatest hindrance in my Monster Hunter Wilds journey to slay monsters and craft the best gear I can has been not the monsters themselves, but the menus.
Even as someone with over 200 hours in Monster Hunter World, Wilds gave me a hard time. The game’s UX is a bizarre mix of being presented with too little and too much information all at once, all of which makes playing the actual game much harder.
For example, MH Wilds implemented a new system that allows players to take two weapons with them on a hunt. It’s a first for the series and a great addition.
But, upon crafting a new weapon, you’re given the option to equip it to either your primary or secondary slot. The game gives no indication as to which weapon appears in which slot. Why does the game not just show you which weapon is your primary and which is your secondary?
This seems like a minor annoyance and, in isolation, it is. You just have to take a trip to your stash and swap out your weapons to make sure they’re right before a hunt. But every single new feature in MH Wilds is tied to a menu function that is unintuitive or incomplete and could easily be fixed.
To give another example, there’s a new menu system that allows players to pull up their entire consumable inventory rather than having to hold a button and scroll through it one by one. Yet this screen binds your camera movement to moving the menu; the same is true for pulling up your extra supplies from your Seikret.
Worse still is, if you’re playing on keyboard and mouse, this not only takes camera control away from you, but you also can’t use your mouse cursor to select items. Instead, you have to use your mouse wheel and… arrow keys? What?
Almost every new menu option in Wilds takes control away from the player, even more so than prior games that were already beset by a bad user experience.
Great, intuitive, and easy-to-use menus could help Monster Hunter feel less intimidating to new players, but Wilds only makes things harder in small and annoying ways that really stack up.
And that’s without mentioning how bizarrely difficult it is to play with your friends.
On top of Wilds’ initial single-player run forcing players to repeatedly rejoin each others’ sessions, the addition of more options than previous titles to play with your friends has made it difficult to figure out what type of lobby or session you should be joining.
Ultimately, Monster Hunter Wilds is a triumph for the franchise. Outside of the game’s poor PC optimization, this is the only real complaint I have with it. It’s easy to sink dozens of hours into Wilds, and it has turned out to be everything I wanted from an MH game.
However, dev time spent on innovating the menu and user experience just as much as the stellar core gameplay would go a long way.
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