Monster Hunter Wilds is a hot candidate for Game of the Year 2025

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MeinMMO editor-in-chief Leya spent the weekend in the Monster Hunter Wilds beta and is sure: The action RPG could be the game of the year next year. The strong numbers and huge community engagement speak for this.

I was sure that Monster Hunter Wilds would be a big and popular game. But the free beta for Xbox, PS5 and PC really showed it. It ended yesterday, November 4th.

The numbers alone speak for themselves: Just 20 minutes after its launch, the open beta on Steam had over 360,000 hunters diligently attacking monsters. According to Steam DB, the highest level is 463,798 players, which is really impressive for a boring beta.

And those are just the numbers on Steam. We’re missing the full picture because we can’t see the numbers for the PS5 and Xbox. Monster Hunter is traditionally at home on consoles. We can assume that the numbers here reached a similar level or were even higher.

Most played on the first day of the beta, and the numbers remained fairly constant over the weekend.

The beta was also popular on Twitch. According to TwitchTracker, Monster Hunter Wilds was able to secure 15th place among the most viewed hours in the last 7 days with 3.63 million hours. Just below in 16th place is Dragon Age: The Veilguard with 3.56 million hours watched. The beta ran for 4 days and was released on the same day as Dragon Age.

Positively surprised, despite high expectations

I spent 10 hours with the beta last weekend and never intended to play for that long. I just wanted to take a quick look to get a quick picture. But the gameplay loop grabbed me.

I came to the franchise almost 15 years ago with Monster Hunter Tri, back then on the Nintendo Wii. I was able to see how the game continued to develop and made its breakthrough in the West in 2018 with Monster Hunter: World. Monster Hunter has never disappointed in terms of quality. World even achieved a Metascore of 90 on Metacritic thanks to the trade press.

I went into the beta with high expectations and was surprised at the end that I liked the gameplay even more than I had already expected.

Monster Hunter Wilds in the atmospheric trailer

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I liked this:

  • the monster designs that look great but are also fun to fight
  • The map shown felt very open despite the open world
  • the dynamic weather system brings variety
  • The time on the new mounts can be used sensibly
  • the co-op multiplayer is more in the foreground
  • You can take two weapons with you when hunting
  • the character editor is a dream

    • This should be improved:

  • Monsters run away too often
  • the auto focus is still tricky
  • the weapons don’t feel powerful enough for the ultimate power fantasy

    • What surprised me positively: Wilds focuses much more on the things that make Monster Hunter core.

    Go out into the world, fight monsters in a loop, grab their loot, upgrade your weapons and equipment with the loot. Use it to fight bigger and stronger monsters. Perfect for people who love looting & leveling, which applies to most gamers.

    At the beginning I was skeptical about what effect the new Seikret mounts would have.

    They simply run towards the monsters on autopilot and searching for them is completely unnecessary. But this allows for larger and freer maps that feel more like an open world. This time the multiplayer is clearly in the foreground and in the beta you were thrown into a large lobby and strongly encouraged to seek help.

    And that is the great strength of the franchise: take down big monsters together in co-op. The beta suggests to me that Capcom has further refined its focus on the game’s strengths.

    I fought my way through the desert with my huntress. She looks pretty damn cool.

    The community is already hyped

    It cannot be underestimated how important strong community engagement has become for the marketing of games. Monster Hunter has always had a very committed community, which has now grown significantly in the West thanks to World.

    Over the beta weekend, my feeds on Twitter/X, Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube were full of Monster Hunter. Discussions take place about the strongest weapons, the monsters or how much everyone has fallen in love with the quest giver Alma. Yes, there are also speedrun lists that deal with the strongest monster in the beta.

    Memes are also emerging from the community. Curiously, the poly monsters, which could have come from a PS2 game, are currently enjoying great popularity in the community thanks to poor performance on the PC:

    There’s a lot of fan art being shared on Twitter/X

    Why a vibrant community is so important: A committed community maintains the buzz, generates curiosity and gets others involved in the hype. High engagement on social media gives developers the opportunity to connect directly with players and build lasting relationships. These relationships then create a stronger bond with the game and the studio.

    Of course, this assumes that a cool game comes out of it in the end. Positive community engagement can also quickly turn into toxic attacks when disappointment takes hold.

    The head of marketing for Larian and therefore also for Baldur’s Gate 3, Michael Douse, even went so far as to say in a panel discussion with PCGamer that classic marketing is dead and that a direct line to a lively community is the key in today’s marketing. Baldur’s Gate 3 was voted Game of the Year 2023 and is also known for its lively community. Success proves them right.

    Monster Hunter: World was already nominated for Game of the Year

    Let’s go back to 2018, when Monster Hunter: World was released. The direct predecessor of Monster Hunter Wilds could have already been Game of the Year.

    At the time, the action RPG competed with:

  • God of War
  • Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
  • Celeste
  • Marvel’s Spider-Man
  • Red Dead Redemption 2

    • God of War won the title of Game of the Year 2018. However, Monster Hunter: World was able to take home the award for best role-playing game.

    GTA 6 and PC performance could get in the way

    You see, I have a lot of faith in Monster Hunter Wilds. The beta weekend has now put me in an even more positive mood.

    However, there is one competitor who will ruin everything when he comes along.

    This is what it looks like with GTA 6: The release of GTA 6 is currently planned for 2025. This will be one of the most relevant releases of the next few years and expectations are high. However, that is precisely why there could be a postponement to 2026. And before the rumor mill gets going – I don’t know any more than you do.

    GTA 6 is too important for Rockstar not to release the game completely polished and in top condition. In addition, Rockstar has a history of releasing releases because their quality standards are very high. A postponement is therefore not that unlikely, even if it is just speculation.

    This is what the performance looks like: The beta sometimes had terrible performance on older PCs, which led to the polygraphics I already mentioned. On our sister site GameStar, Duy Linh Dinh wrote about how power-hungry Monster Hunter Wilds is and the downsides of DLSS and FSR.

    Capcom has already commented on this. The beta is said to have been an old version and they are working on bringing the game smoothly to the PC.

    When GTA 6 appears, the rest can pack in.

    Whether Game of the Year or not: It will be good

    Whether Monster Hunter: Wilds will really be the Game of the Year remains to be seen. I fully expect a nomination.

    What’s much more important to me is that the beta convinced me that Monster Hunter Wilds will probably be even better than its direct predecessor, World.

    Capcom also gets a big boost from me when it comes to Monster Hunter, as the studio has always delivered. How things will turn out in reality remains to be seen. Until then, I’ll pack up the crystal ball again and look forward to the release in February 2025.

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