Monster Hunter Wilds arrives at an interesting time, one when the franchise is caught between the popular Monster Hunter Worlds and the more recent Monster Hunter Rise, with players wondering where the newest entry will fall when it comes to old and new features. A bevy of new trailer deep-dives is starting to answer more of those questions for fans.
Coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC sometime in 2025, Monster Hunter Wilds is definitely leaning into the newer hardware with a bigger, seamless open world and impressive visual effects. But there’s also a host of features from the series’ past that it can pull from or build upon, ranging from which hunter classes to prioritize to which monsters to highlight.
Each of today’s trailers focuses on a different aspect of the game, with weapon overviews, a look at basic mechanics, and one delving into Monster Hunter Wilds’ new focus mode. Among other things they confirmed that Scoutflies, which guide players to their hunted targets, are back. Publisher Capcom also teased fans with the silhouettes of unannounced classes, including the monster-crafted weapons they’ll be sporting. And nobody could take their eyes off the giant butt crack in one of the monster-fighting videos. But a smaller detail fans spotted that instantly became a big deal was the new 3D minimap:
Where most games, including Monster Hunter, traditionally give players a flat, 2D map to help with navigating between objectives and identifying out-of-bounds terrain, Monster Hunter Wilds sports a spherical minimap that shows elevations so you can tell when a path is going to take you up a mountain or down into a ravine. It packs a bunch of information, complete with cute little icons, into a very tight space.
“I love it,” wrote one fan on the subreddit. “Worlds’ maps had a lot of interconnected verticality in them, so a top down view alone made some areas very challenging to navigate at first. This map adding depth is a fantastic change that reminds me of the maps in the Metroid Prime games. Those maps are the gold standards of navigation in an interconnected 3D environment, so anything even close to them is good in my book!” The only major complaint some have is how much it spins, though past Monster Hunter games have usually had settings to lock the minimap to true North.
Elsewhere, the new trailers show off some of the ways that monsters change their appearance as they take more damage through each successive phase of a fight. There’s also a new focus mode that lets you aim attacks like you’re looking down the scope of a gun in a first-person shooter. The camera and your character will stay locked-on and static even as you strafe so you can repeatedly target the same weak points and do more damage. There are even focus attacks that, in addition to being more effective, just look really cool.
You can watch all three of the trailers in full below:
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