‘We’re at the next level’: Monster Hunter Wilds’ creators on the secret behind Capcom’s new golden era | VGC

On the 2nd floor of Capcom’s R&D1 building in Osaka, Japan, we’re offered only the slightest of glimpses at the secrets inside. Beyond a tour of the building’s motion capture studio (one of three in the city), and a nearby audio department, our time here is confined almost entirely to a large, typical meeting room, where we spent several hours playing Monster Hunter Wilds.

From my experience visiting various Japanese companies over the years, the aesthetics of corporate offices are usually unremarkable, and bar some kind of Street Fighter-themed cafeteria hidden beyond one of the many locked doors, Capcom appears to be no exception.

However, one thing stood out: the various employee signage around the office, instructing staff not to slam doors, put their trash in the incorrect waste bin, or even fall asleep on the toilet, is displayed in both Japanese and English. In public, most Japanese street signage has been in English for over a decade, but within the halls of the Street Fighter and Resident Evil creator, the addition still feels somewhat significant.

Over the past seven years, Capcom has become the gold standard in its home nation – and arguably, the world – as a consistent creator of big, blockbuster games that resonate with a global audience. During this period, the company has reported seven consecutive years of record-high profits, and twice been the highest rated publisher from press reviews aggregated on Metacritic. Its share price also reached an all-time high, and if you’d invested in stock a decade ago, when it was putting out the likes of Umbrella Corps, Dead Rising 4, and Lost Planet 3, you’d currently be enjoying gains of over 1000%.

There are some obvious factors behind this successful period, not least that it increased its quality control and put out a roster of excellent games, using its most popular franchises, sticking closely to its core strengths. The company has also adopted a multiplatform strategy (enjoying significant growth on PC in particular), aggressively pushed digital releases, and adopted its own internal technology platform, RE Engine, with crucial knowledge sharing across all development teams.

But that signage in the toilet is a reminder of another important change behind the scenes in Capcom’s culture: at its Japanese HQ, it’s been thinking more globally than ever. Other Japanese publishers have attempted to appeal more to Western players as the country’s home console market has shrunk, but few have managed it as successfully and authentically as the Monster Hunter creator.

This is partly because, to better ensure its games appeal to a global audience, since 2018, Capcom’s Japanese arm has doubled its number of foreign employees, which now make up nearly 7%. The last Street Fighter, Devil May Cry, and Resident Evil games all had Western producers too, and the company says it’s made changes to its work environment, such as offering more annual leave and assistance to find housing, to strengthen this diversity even further.

“What you describe about diversification of the team here are true,” Monster Hunter series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto told VGC in an interview. “It’s not that we radically altered the structure of the company: It’s still very much a Japanese company with mostly Japanese employees. However, not only do we have more non-Japanese employees than ever before, but the localization team itself, which will naturally be made up of non-Japanese people, has been greatly expanded in recent years, and that’s expanded our global reach with games.

“That’s allowed us to release games in more languages, in more regions. But importantly, our ability to reach out to our global staff members who aren’t here [in Japan] has improved significantly during this period. Not just discussing the game content with them or getting player feedback, but even just our awareness or our ability to put games out at events.”

He added: “For example, if we want to exhibit at an event in a certain country, or if we want to show a trailer for the first time at a particular event that’s happening somewhere. We’ve been able to globalize our marketing approach and have much more tight-knit communication between all our different global teams.

“With each of our local offices, compared to the past, we’re in much closer communication, constantly sharing feedback, and they’re keeping us informed about what players in their regions are thinking and saying about our games.

“That’s not something that’s development-specific, of course, but that means as a whole company, globally, we probably do have a much-improved ability to pull off this kind of global hit-making that we’ve been doing. That kind of internal globalisation is something that has really, I think, pushed our ability to create a global title to the next level.”

The World Stage

There’s been no better example of Capcom’s modern golden age than Monster Hunter World. While Resident Evil and Street Fighter were always popular outside of Japan, the action RPG series historically struggled to find an audience beyond the shores of Capcom’s home territory. Then, in 2017, that all changed.

At 20.9 million units (or 27 million, if you include the standalone Iceborne expansion), Monster Hunter World is now, by far, Capcom’s best-selling game ever, beating out every Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and Devil May Cry title before it.

The series had existed for 14 years before then and had nearly always enjoyed strong sales in its home market of Japan, but it took the 2018 title for the franchise to truly reach its potential on the world stage, with smart gameplay tweaks, a focus on online play, and a simultaneous release on home consoles, contributing to its breakout success globally.

According to the game’s director, Yuya Tokuda – who’s also helming the upcoming Wilds – this success was no coincidence but rather part of a significant effort to broaden the franchise’s appeal.

“Monster Hunter World was really the title where we put a lot of effort into making it a global success,” Tokuda told VGC. “As director, I didn’t think of it as an approach of how to get Western players on board, as much as a general, broader review of accessibility of the series at that time.

“There are a few specific details that really speak to this. For example, damage numbers were never shown before. It was fun to read the monster’s behavior and know what you were doing, but the feedback of whether you were doing the right thing… If you couldn’t grasp that off the bat, then a lot of players were bouncing off the game at that point, because they just didn’t understand if the fight was even progressing.

“So by adding in damage numbers, we didn’t do that lightly, but we did a lot of testing with different players, and we just saw that it was generally beneficial to every type of player, not just Western players, but anyone who’s playing the game, to understand better what’s actually happening moment-to-moment in the game.”

He added: “Another example would be the pickaxes and similar items that you use to hit the rock formations on the map when you receive rock-based materials. Before Monster Hunter World, those were consumable items, and you had to bring them with you in your item parts. You had to bring five pickaxes and bug nets and that kind of thing, and they would break after a few uses. It was a constant low-level item admin that you had to be handling just to be able to gather resources that are actually necessary to progress.”

“As director, I didn’t think of it as an approach of how to get Western players on board, as much as a general, broader review of accessibility of the series at that time.”

Series producer Tsujimoto agrees that it was many small changes, rather than any major overhaul, that contributed to World’s popularity.

“I think that the idea of making a game that feels comfortable to get into, one which is enjoyable to pick up, get good at, and enjoy the gameplay cycle… that hasn’t changed, and it didn’t before World, and it hasn’t since. I think there’s just a variety of factors surrounding the actual gameplay that we were able to improve and be more globally minded on.

“For example, just the simple fact that the game was localized in more languages than it had been previously. The localizations were released at the same time as the Japanese game on the same date worldwide, rather than the previous titles, which had always had this six-months-to-a-year delay.”

He added: “Those are more practical considerations than gameplay, but I think that getting all the aspects that you need to make a global AAA hit in the modern industry, getting all those things right in a way that maybe we hadn’t been taking the mark on before, I think it all came together with Monster Hunter World and created the massive success that we saw with that game.”

Wild Hunt

As you might expect following a hit of the magnitude of World, Tokuda says his team took their time preparing a true follow-up, so that it could properly analyse what gameplay elements resonated with players and made the 2017 game such a breakout success.

Our six hours of hands-on time with Monster Hunter Wilds suggest Capcom’s opted for a much more cinematic, RPG-style experience than its predecessor, with a stronger focus on a seamless open world experience, and improved consideration for the on-boarding of players who might be new to the series.

The slow and steady combat fans love is here and improved – a new ‘Focus’ lock-on system allowing players to target monsters’ specific body parts, and the ability to switch between two weapons while on a hunt, feel like welcome additions that will offer a lot of depth. But simultaneously, hunting and exploration are much improved, with a truly open world and fast traversal on the back of mounts.

Significantly, the game’s maps now allow players to see where certain items or monsters will be depending on the time of day. The game has a full day and night cycle, as well as a dynamic weather system, which has a major effect on which monsters will spawn.

Tokuda said many of these changes were based on player data from Worlds. “We have a lot of telemetry data that we can get from Monster Hunter World, and we can see how far players were getting into the game until they lapsed or maybe couldn’t progress any further,” he explained.

“Now that we’ve built up six years [of data] and we’ve seen what it is people respond to in different regions and what stuff they find too hard to understand or anything like that, we’ve been able to refine things like the onboarding with tutorials and the difficulty curve and the way we explain things in the game.”

One of the most compelling changes in Wilds versus World is in how quests are initiated. In addition to standard quest initiation methods, there’s now a seamless flow where players can initiate hunts directly on the map, and stick around once a hunt is over. In addition, Base Camp is now a part of the world map itself, so players can seamlessly travel between the various NPC helpers and actual monster hunting, without loading screens.

According to Tokuda, creating this level of seamless integration in the game world took a lot of development effort, due to the sheer amount of data required to pull it off.

“There are a huge number of monsters and NPCs moving around in the world, and there’s no barrier between the human settlements and the maps anymore, so we’re constantly having to keep track in the background of all the AI behavior and movements and what they’re doing at any given time,” he explained.

“When you add in the fact that the weather can change and everyone’s behavior is going to change at the same time, it’s actually a lot of development work has gone into keeping all that stuff happening in the background so that no matter where the player goes, they feel like they’re experiencing like a living, breathing world where everyone’s behaving of their own accord.

“I think that it brings a new level of immersion to the game to not have to stop and start every time you want to hunt a monster, but it was definitely quite a job to get us to this point.”

Following a Monster

From the outside, you’d expect working on Monster Hunter Wilds to be a very different experience to World. With the latter, Capcom was trying to attract a larger audience to one of its proven franchises. But with Wilds comes the pressure of following up the biggest game in the company’s history.

“I’ve been working on the series since the very first Monster Hunter game,” art director Kaname Fujioka told VGC. “I feel with Monster Hunter World, we took a massive leap forward that we hadn’t managed to achieve in a single title before. So many new players joined the community and are now on this journey with us.

“It might sound obvious that you would feel pressure, but for me, it was more about the challenge of thinking about how to satisfy the needs of those players with the next game, something that was always in the back of my mind.”

Director Tokuda agreed that the experience of building on World with Wilds had been a positive one, and added that he was excited simply to push the design further, without the constraints of last-gen console hardware.

“Monster Hunter World was the game where we really challenged ourselves to push the series in all kinds of new ways and make lots of bold new decisions about the game design in an effort to expand the audience way beyond the reach of what we’d seen before,” he said.

“That was such a successful endeavour that, rather than feeling pressured from working on the follow-up to our best-selling title ever, I actually found it a really positive and exciting experience, at least in the beginning of the design phase of the project,” he added.

“That’s not to say that certain pressures didn’t come later on. But the idea that I could take something which had already been proven to have been a successful idea, a successful concept, and think, wow, with the changes in hardware in the last six years, I could push this aspect of Monster Hunter World even further.”

Series producer Tsujimoto seems to be feeling more pressure than most, but insisted that this wasn’t necessarily increased by World’s monster sales figures.

“Maybe as a producer, I’m the one who has to take all the pressure that these guys don’t get! But it’s a good point that World was our best-selling game ever, and I want to make sure that we follow up on it. It’s not a direct sequel per se, but it’s the next step forward for the franchise.

“The audience for the game became its biggest ever with Monster Hunter World, but also awareness of the series expanded beyond the player base in a global way at that time. This is our biggest Monster Hunter project ever as a development project, and I feel pressure to perform well as a producer or project manager, but it doesn’t really matter the scale of the game or the past success you’re building on.

“The fundamental idea of always doing better, of making the next game go further, improving on what you’ve done before, and responding to players’ needs and feedback, has been the same for me throughout my career and for the 20 years of Monster Hunter. It’s not something that I haven’t thought about for any game, regardless of whether the past title was a best-seller or a big project.”