Just over four years ago, Niantic representatives sat down with Capcom to propose a Monster Hunter game similar to what Niantic had done with pokemon go. To hear the companies tell the story, Capcom agreed in the chamber.
Within a few months, Niantic had ramped up staff at its newly established Tokyo studio and built a prototype with monsters overlaid on a real world map. Over the next four years, Niantic worked on the idea, built out the technology, tried some things that didn’t work (like making all combat based on gyroscope controls), and came up with an approach that will feel very familiar to Monster. Hunter fans.
Before Niantic showed off the game during this week’s Summer Game Fest Play Days, Polygon participated in a closed beta test for the game and spoke with Niantic CEO John Hanke and chief product officer Kei Kawai, as well as Capcom Monster Hunter executive producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and Monster hunter now producer Genki Sunano, to get a better look at how the game came about.
In short, the time spent seems to be paying off. Monster hunter now feels like the most traditional video game Niantic has made. Of course, since this is a Niantic game, there are plenty of twists and turns on what “traditional” means.
Image: Niantic
How it works
Like most Niantic games, Monster hunter now places you on a real world map and asks you to explore the fictional universe on top of it. Here that means digging up resources and fighting monsters while exploring swamps, deserts and forests.
The first thing you notice is how fast the interface works. You can see a smaller enemy on the map, tap it to zoom in and fight, take them out with a few quick hits, and zoom back to the map in about three seconds. Bigger monsters have a bit more settings and a results screen that shows what you’ve earned at the end, but those too can go by in 10-15 seconds early on. Digging for resources is equally fast, and the game assigns you a Palico cat companion who will run around and do much of the digging for you, so it’s easy to play while walking outside without having to put your head in your phone hold.
As part of that, there’s a nice mix of active and passive play. You can fight when you have time, but while you’re walking around with your phone in your pocket, your Palico is hunting for resources on its own. The game tags monsters you encounter so you can fight later, so there’s a good balance with the game rewarding you for going out even if you don’t open the app. You can also tag large monsters yourself with paintballs to essentially catch them on your phone and add them to a list so you can fight them whenever you want – which, aside from a fun Monster Hunter throwback, makes for quite a thematic connection to Pokémon.
Most of the game, however, consists of battles against larger monsters, with combat that feels meaty and substantial. Swipe to go left, right, in or out. Choose lighter weapons for quick attacks or heavier weapons to charge up big hits with elaborate animations. Aim at specific parts of monsters to knock them over. Time dodges perfectly to get a stat boost on your next swing. It’s simpler than a traditional Monster Hunter game, of course, but has much of the same feel.
“Between the time we designed pokemon gothat started in 2014 I think and then as we started working on this game in 2019 mobile networks got a lot better much more robust there was much lower latency so we felt like we could push the boundaries in terms of fast , fast, low-latency battles in multiplayer,” says Hanke.
One of the game’s big twists on the Monster Hunter formula is a 75-second battle timer, designed to make it easy to play with others outdoors. This changes your priorities in battle, where you can try to avoid getting hit, not because of the damage you’d take, but because of the time your recovery animation would eat up. According to Kawai, the team has conducted extensive experiments to establish the time window and is still open to adjusting it as the team gathers more feedback.
“We’ll see how it goes,” he says. “I don’t think we ever will [have] Fights of 20 minutes.”
The speed also ties in with how the game’s multiplayer works, which is faster and easier than in something like this pokemon go. There is no lobby. You just tap an icon when you’re ready to fight a monster and the game sends you names of nearby players ready to join. Tap again and you all go into battle, with up to four players at a time.
Image: Niantic
It’s worth noting that early in the beta, the game isn’t particularly difficult. While you can access a number of weapons and mine resources, forge new weapons and armor, upgrade your supplies, and use power-ups, you don’t have to do any of that. Most enemies will fall easily if you just tap the screen a few times. Kawai says players will track down more challenging monsters over time – apparently four- and five-star monsters are more or less impossible for individual players to take down on their own.
According to Tsujimoto, this is done to get players used to the game’s interface in the early stages, but it doesn’t take long.
“An important element of an action game is that you learn from your mistakes when you can’t beat a certain monster,” says Tsujimoto. “You learn if you made the wrong move, if you used the wrong weapon, and so on. And we think this game has the right progression for the player to learn what they need to do to defeat those monsters.”
The beta does not allow players to buy the game’s currency, but instead give out a certain amount per day for free (used for items such as health-replenishing potions, Well-Done Steak to temporarily boost your life bar, and a Wander Orb to increase the size of the area where you can find things while exploring), so it’s hard to judge how well the game will balance difficulty progression and monetization at this point.
What’s next
One of the big remaining questions is how the game will develop beyond the early stages. We know that players can forge new weapons and armor and upgrade their equipment, as well as find bigger and more difficult monsters to fight. But I’ve only been able to cover the first hour of the beta for this story, so it’s hard to say how different the game will feel as you increase your rank over time.
Niantic also says the game will change quite a bit ahead of its official release in September, so additional features may be added between now and then.
Do you like cooking?
“We’re not going to talk about that today,” says Kawai with a laugh.
“As far as Palico is concerned, there are of course plenty of opportunities to develop new elements, and we are very excited to explore them,” added Sunano.
Anyway, I’m quite happy with the game as it stands. Like Pokémon, the Monster Hunter license feels like a natural fit for a card-based game, and exploring to find monsters and dig up bones, metals, and crystals feels much stronger narratively than, say, walking to grow plants in Picmin Bloomor collect crystals to increase your stamina NBA All World.
You do throw paintballs to save monsters in a Rolodex to fight them whenever you want. But sometimes convenience is more important.