Capcom only released Monster Hunter Wilds on February 28, however achievement and trophy data reveals that around half of the game’s players have already unlocked the high rank environments, suggesting that many have been playing the game heavily since release.
You start out in Monster Hunter Wilds at low rank. This is essentially the game’s main story, which introduces you to different monster types, their behaviors and how to hunt them. To unlock high rank, you need to reach the game’s end credits, i.e. finish the main story. Although Wilds was only released last week, 53.9% of Steam players and 47.1% of PS5 players have already unlocked the High Rank environments.
To put this in perspective, let’s look at the stats for the series’ previous mainline entry, 2018’s Monster Hunter World. In World, 53.9% of Steam players and 47.5% of PS4 players have unlocked the achievement/trophy “Death Begets Life” for successfully guiding Zorah Magdaros, thus unlocking six-star assignments and reaching the high rank environments. These are almost the same percentages as Wilds, however, Monster Hunter Wilds has only been available for a week, whereas Monster Hunter World launched 7 years ago.
The fact that around half of the players have already reached high rank could also be thanks to Wilds’ speedier and improved gameplay. Both World and Wilds are spacious, open-world games with mounts that can be ridden to help you cover the distance between hunts. However, Monster Hunter Wilds’ Seikret mounts have an autopilot that swiftly takes you straight to your next hunt, potentially cutting down on travel time if you choose to use it. Part of the reason autopilot was added to the game was because there were reports of people quitting 2018’s Monster Hunter World without even making it to the end of a hunt.
Monster Hunter Wilds’ UI was also designed to make it easily accessible to a variety of players, and the difficulty of the low rank hunts was designed to increase very gradually, making it potentially less likely that players will run into something that will make them give up. Series veterans and experienced open-world RPG players have likely found it easy to zoom through to the high rank environments of Monster Hunter Wilds without much trouble.
Then there’s the fact that Monster Hunter Wilds has a powerful, addictive pull on many players. While Balatro addicts might be thinking “just one more run,” Monster Hunter Wilds players are thinking “I’ll just explore this valley, I’ll just complete this short hunt, etc.” Although player numbers have started to decline a little over the past two days, Monster Hunter Wilds has been attracting a steady peak of concurrent players on Steam, ranging from around 1.3 million to 1.1 million (source: SteamDB)- suggesting that many are playing the game every day (while maybe popping out for a cheese naan at lunchtime). Even the PR manager of The Hundred Line got so distracted by hunting in Wilds that they forgot to log in to the 100-day challenge for their own game.
Monster Hunter Wilds is available now on PC (Steam), Xbox Series X|S and PS5.
