Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak’s new map takes a different tack

Monster Hunter Ascension: Sunburn is the upcoming expansion to monster hunter riselast year’s Nintendo Switch-only Monster Hunter game, which came to PC in early 2022. It promises new monsters to fight, new companions to fight, expansion too rise‘s switch skill system and more high-flying adventures with the wirebug.

but sun break is not just “more” of rise, instead completely breaking with the Japanese folklore theme of its base game. Polygon spoke in a translated interview sun break Producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and Director Yoshitake Suzuki on how the expansion is paying off rise‘s success while giving players something new.

In a video demo for sun breakCapcom showed off two new monster hunts, one of which took place in the expansion’s spooky new area, the Citadel.

“With rise, it was more focused on the motif of Japanese folklore,” Tsujimoto said. “But with the addition of new master rank quests on the sun break page, once [players] begin to take place in these, they will be more fully immersed in the western motif.”

Tsujimoto was referring to sun break‘s clear interest in the gothic castles of classic movie monsters like Dracula – the expansion is Monster Hunter over Castlevania or Capcom’s own Resident Evil Village. The Citadel is a European-looking mountain clearing filled with ruins and foliage.

Despite its scenic beauty, a purple, menacing veil hangs over the map, giving the area an eerie feel. As players climb over the ruined castle towers and into the snow-capped mountains, it should be clear that they are nowhere near Kamura Village (the main hub for players). rise) more.

Image: Capcom

But these tonal shifts should not be taken as a shift in philosophy sun break. Despite the new staging, Capcom has worked to preserve and improve the card movement that we praised in our review rise last year.

“One of our focal points in our work sun break “It was really about introducing a new location that can really take advantage of the new features and mobility that we introduced in the base game,” Suzuki said. “[…] It was important to us not to deviate from the total size of the previous fields in the game. […] So mobility was definitely a key part of how we designed the layout of this new map.”

However, Suzuki clarified that Capcom was still careful not to overwhelm Hunters with too much scope.

In the clips we’ve seen, hunters could wirebug over cliffs and mountains and strategically drop from a different area of ​​the map. The mountains look new and imposing, but the map folds in nicely – like many of rise‘S BEST CARDS – for easy travel between zones.

Just like them iceborn Extension did with World of Monster Hunters, sun break shows Capcom’s work in continuing the features players loved with the base version, only with far harder monsters and quests. But not how iceborn, sun breakThe aesthetic change of gives players a whole different world to explore. Ideally, this gives the expansion a newer feel than iceborn did, even if hunters use the same tricks to navigate a similarly sized world.

Capcom will publish Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak on June 30th.