Hunting games have exploded in popularity over the past few years. monster hunter world Proof of its ludicrous sales figures — in making the genre more accessible — Capcom It is possible to secure a large audience for this once niche genre. Now other developers and publishers have really started to take notice.
These include Dynasty Warriors developers, omega powerand publisher electronic arts (and it’s more experimental EA original imprint). Of course, the developer is no stranger to the genre: 10 years ago it released the doomed PSP/PS Vita series Toukiden: Age of Demons – a game that was well played and well done , but will never find the right game for the very small audience in the West who are really bothered about buying a Vita.
But now, a decade later, the developer has once again emerged from the salt mine of Dynasty Warriors to take on one of gaming’s most powerful brands: Monster Hunter. Ask anyone who likes the Capcom series, and they’ll probably tell you that it’s near-perfect – in terms of gameplay, world-building, combat, and most recently, quality of life, Monster Hunter as a series is just about right. almost.
“Monster Hunter is a massive game, and it’s an unbelievable thing Capcom has done,” Koei Tecmo director Takuto Eda told iGamesNews. But at the same time, right now in the hunting game genre, I think we feel like there’s only one big game — Monster Hunter is the dominant game. We don’t want to follow them and what they’re making, and Make the same game.
“Instead, we wanted to make sure we were independent of them and doing our own thing. We were strong developers and established and wanted to make something our own way.”
I’ve been playing Wild Hearts for a week now, and I’ve put in about 30 hours so far. It gets a lot wrong–the camerawork is terrible, the frivolous combat lacks real charm, and the building mechanics are a little weird–but there’s a charm to this game that I can’t quite get my head around. It keeps me coming back every day, even if I take off the headphones the night before and quit in frustration.
But perhaps one of the most impressive elements of the title is the form of its accessibility menu. That’s what sets it apart so far. From the very beginning of the game – even before you start a hunt! – We encourage you to browse through all the menus and choose everything that will make your life easier for the next few hours.
There’s a set of colorblind options, and you can cycle through various text sizes to make subs easier to read, as well as a button to keep time toggled, making interacting with the world easier and quicker. There are even screen reader, text-to-speech and speech-to-text options – you can change the speed of text translation! Omega Force and EA haven’t skimped on these accessibility options–this is one of the most robust menus I’ve seen in a hunting game.
Compare that to Monster Hunter’s frankly paltry setup, and you can see a huge difference between the games right from the start. Monster Hunter games are notoriously difficult to penetrate for new players (although better tutorial suites are being reversed in newer games), and I hope that if the series learns anything from Wild Hearts, it’s how to achieve a solid, no-nonsense An admittedly impressive set of accessibility options for the next game — Monster Hunter World 2, I think we’re all hoping.
It feels like Wild Hearts is following the path laid out by Sony Studios and the path we’ve seen with The Last of Us (Parts 1 and 2), God of War, and other first-party exclusives. Between this software support and the kind of hardware we’ve seen with the Xbox Adaptive Controller and PlayStation Project Leonardo, there’s never been a better time for gaming accessibility. It’s really nice to see EA and Omega Force also go this route, I hope this is the first of many.
