According to the franchise’s producer, this period has given Capcom a lot of experience in ensuring that certain platforms are not left behind in terms of release.

In an interview with GamesRadar, Monster Hunter Wilds producer Ryozo Tsujimoto talked about the Japanese publisher’s increasingly positive attitude towards PCs (they had a lot to improve on: in the mid-2000s, the Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition, Onimusha 3 and Resident Evil 4 ports were scandalously bad!) This was partly responsible for Monster Hunter Wilds being released on consoles and PC at the same time, and with cross-play!

According to Tsujimoto, more people are playing on the PC than ever before, and so Capcom sees room to reach new players, as there are bound to be some who have never played the franchise before and have chosen this platform, and with the simultaneous multiplatform release, we can choose where we play, and so we can hunt the Japanese company’s monsters with our friends online without any strings attached.

Monster Hunter Wilds is the first installment in the franchise’s history that won’t leave PC gamers in the lurch. Monster Hunter World had an eight-month wait, while Monster Hunter Rise was initially exclusive to Nintendo Switch. Even Fortnite, Destiny, and Baldur’s Gate 3 struggled with cross-play due to the technical requirements of those titles. And Tsujimoto, in another interview, celebrated the handheld’s past because of this:

“Even if you wanted to play the game, having enough broadband and equipment to connect your console to the Internet was not necessarily a given for most consumers at the time. The move to PSP and then Nintendo 3DS helped us overcome that lack of infrastructure, and in the meantime, the infrastructure has caught up. The work we did to make the game work on portable devices with local networks really helped us with the design of the online games that followed. So it definitely wasn’t a distraction. It was just a realistic approach to meeting the needs of players given the limitations of the infrastructure at the time,” Tsujimoto said.

Monster Hunter Wilds will be released on February 28th for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC. Don’t even try to play it on the Steam Deck!

Source: PCGamer, GamesRadar,