Building A Better Hunter By Going Hands-On With Wild Hearts

Capcom’s Monster Hunter can easily be drawn from Wild Hearts, the upcoming hunting game from EA and Koei Tecmo publisher and developer Omega Force. Wild Hearts is a game where you explore a vast open area with one or his two other players, fighting and defeating giant monsters that move around the map. The developers aren’t avoiding the comparison entirely, but they’re aiming for more than replicating Monster Hunter.

Speaking through a translator, Koei Tecmo directors Kotaro Hirata and Takuto Edagawa said, “When we make a hunting game, Monster Hunter has a big presence in the genre, so it’s a good idea for us. I can’t say I drew it, I used it for strong inspiration, but it’s not that I didn’t know it was there while I was making the game.”

The comparison is apt, as the games share many similarities, but developer Omega Force has explored the genre before with several games in the Toukiden series. Like Monster Hunter and Wild Hearts, hunt giant monsters and harvest materials that can be used to upgrade your equipment. Despite the genre’s pedigree, Omega’s Force is quick to say that Wild Hearts isn’t an extension of that world. “Unfortunately there is no overlap. This is a completely new IP for us. We know some fans wanted overlap with Toukiden, but that’s not the case,” said Hirata and Edagawa. said Mr. Wild Hearts and Toukiden he exists in two separate universes, but Wild Hearts allows Omega Force to pick up heavily funded and pick up where they left off in the genre, with an impression called Karakuri. While exploring a unique production system, it makes it stand out.

Wild Hearts has been in development for four years and represents an unlikely partnership between EA and Koei Tecmo. The former is an American publisher primarily known for sports games, while the latter is a successful Japanese publisher with the historical action series Dynasty Warriors. Wild Hearts is published under his EA’s Originals label, which spawned successful games like Unravel and his 2021 It Takes Two. EA Originals has so far done a good job of embracing the word ‘original’ and publishing a game you wouldn’t normally expect to come from EA, but we’ll see Wild Hearts announced. is still surprising.

Playing it is also amazing in some ways but not at all amazing in others. We were given access to an early build that allowed us to play the opening and first few major combat encounters. Anyone would know. The movements are similar, as is the basic combat in the tutorial. The layout of the world, the large, dense and clearly separated areas accessible from the hub cities, each inhabited by several different creatures, also feels familiar. The process of defeating has a rhythm that I have experienced before, but there are many elements that give the game a unique identity. The main one is the Karakuri system.

Contraptions are a crafting system, a type of magic that, in Wild Hearts fiction, instantly produces impressive pieces of engineering that can be used in fascinating ways. The first trick to unlock is the ability to spawn a box you can climb onto and eject you into the air above it. can. This is useful for exploring the environment, but it’s really fun when you’re fighting beasts. You can dodge or create barriers to slow down rampaging beasts. Creating these devices is quick and reminiscent of Fortnite’s expert builders. Even in my short time in the game, I’ve unlocked a collection of interesting things that will help me both in and out of combat.

In my second encounter with the beast, I unlocked what is best described as a bounce pad. I’ve used this to fire quickly out of the way of incoming attacks, or shoot at beasts for extra damage. After that battle, I unlocked a giant rope arrow, attached it to the ground and shot it far away, creating a zipline that allowed me to travel around the world faster and easier. The video also showed walls used in battle and equipment for gliding from high places. Another nice thing about karakuri is that they are persistent in your world, just like karakuri placed by other players in the game. Anyone can use this.

According to Hirata and Edagawa, Craft was an early idea the team wanted to integrate into Wild Hearts. In the first version, you had to prepare your device before going out into the world, or find and carry it along the way. Through iterations, however, they realized that quickly crafting devices in the heat of battle was much more fun. Optimistically speaking, the Karakuri system is the mechanic that distinguishes hunting games on par with Wild Hearts, and I was impressed with how quickly the device was integrated into combat.

Another great feature of Wild Hearts is the beast design. Omega Force’s goal for creatures is a combination of animal and nature. Like some of the kemono I’ve fought, the shared kemono had distinct familiar animal roots, but was covered in what looked like tree roots and moss. When we started the design, we wanted the game field to have the effect of monsters eroding the surrounding nature, taking shape, and actually collapsing the battlefield,” said Hirata and Edagawa. The beast looks as if it’s curled up in the woods and confused with a giant boulder.

I used a standard Kitana and unlocked the Umbrella weapon during my fight with the Kemono. When used correctly, this allowed me to briefly float in the air and dodge various attacks. The game also features his six other weapons, each with their own combo system and finishing move animations.

When you kill a beast, you have the chance to deliver the finishing blow with fancy animations before the fight is truly over. Doing this will end the battle and all the loot of the victory will be given to you immediately. No need to stand over corpses and collect bounties manually. Hirata and Edagawa believe this is a distinguishing element of Wild Hearts, saying, “We wanted to differentiate ourselves from other hunting games, so one of the ways we did it was to If a player puts their life on the line, I wanted an object to automatically come to you at the end of the game to defeat this monster.”

Other small details we learned from our time in the game and our talks with Hirata and Edagawa is that Wild Hearts includes an English dub (the demo was in Japanese), and that cooperative players will be able to enjoy the battles. You can stop along the way. The main story campaign takes about 30 hours to complete, but there are side him quests to tackle as well as plenty of post-game content that expands gameplay. Omega Force also promised full crossplay support and hinted at some light farming mechanics.

Wild Hearts will feel familiar to fans of hunting games like Monster Hunter, but this game walked away impressed with the big swing from Omega Force and EA. It doesn’t look or play particularly like a game (other than Toukiden). It’s a mechanic that helps Wild Hearts stand out from the crowd, and I enjoyed the process of scrambling the stacks of boxes I created, jumping off the top, and delivering powerful blows to the rampaging beasts. In the future, I think we’ll be doing a lot more with various mechanical devices.