Monster Hunter Now beta impressions and interview

Niantic’s representatives met with Capcom a little more than four years back to suggest a Monster Hunter video game that was similar to Niantic’s popular Pokémon. Pokémon Go. Capcom, after hearing the two companies’ stories in person, agreed.

Niantic began hiring in its new Tokyo studio within a month and developed a prototype featuring monsters overlaid on an actual map. Over the next four years, Niantic chipped away at the idea, built out the technology, tried some things that didn’t work out (like making all combat based around gyroscope controls), and settled on an approach that will feel very familiar to Monster Hunter fans.

Ahead of Niantic showing the game at this week’s Summer Game Fest Play Days, Polygon participated in a closed beta test for the game and spoke to Niantic CEO John Hanke and chief product officer Kei Kawai, as well as Capcom Monster Hunter executive producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and Monster Hunter NowGenki Sunano is the producer of the game. He will give you a detailed look into how it has been put together.

It seems that the effort has been worth it. Monster Hunter NowIt feels the most “traditional” video game Niantic’s ever made. Of course, this being a Niantic game, there are plenty of twists on what “traditional” means.

Niantic

What it does

As with most Niantic Games, Monster Hunter NowThe game places you in a realistic map, and then asks you explore the imaginary universe layered above. It’s a game where you have to dig up resources, fight monsters and explore swamps, forests and deserts.

First, the speed of its interface is impressive. In just three seconds, you can zoom into a small enemy, fight them, then zoom out again. The setup for bigger monsters is a little more complicated, and there’s a screen at the end that displays your results. However, you can still pass them by within 10-15 seconds. Digging for resources is similarly quick, and the game assigns you a Palico cat partner who runs around doing much of the digging for you, so it’s easy to play while walking outside without needing to keep your head buried in your phone.

As part of that, there’s a nice mix of active and passive play. Palico is able to hunt for resources by itself as you move around. The game will tag monsters you come across for you to fight later, so there’s a good balance where the game rewards you for going out even when you don’t open the app. You can also tag large monsters yourself with paintballs to essentially capture them in your phone and add them to a list so you can fight them whenever you want — which, apart from being a nice Monster Hunter throwback, makes for a decent thematic connection to Pokémon.

Combat is a meaty, substantial part of the majority of this game. You can swipe to go left, right or in and out. Select lighter weapons to make quick attacks. Choose heavier weapons for big, explosive hits. To knock monsters over, target specific areas of the creature. To get the stat boost, you need to time dodge perfectly. It’s simpler than a traditional Monster Hunter game, to be sure, but carries over much of the same feel.

“Between the time that we designed Pokémon Go, which started in 2014 I guess, and when we started working on this game in 2019, mobile networks got a lot better, a lot more robust, there was a lot lower latency, so we felt like we could push the envelope in terms of fast, high-speed, low-latency combat in multiplayer,” says Hanke.

One of the game’s big twists on the Monster Hunter formula is a 75-second timer on fights, designed to make it easy to play with others outdoors. This changes your priorities in battle, where you may try to avoid taking a hit not because of the damage you’d take, but because of the time your recovery animation would eat up. Kawai says that they have done extensive testing to find the right timeframe, but are open to changing it based on feedback.

“We’ll see how it goes,” he says. “I don’t think we’ll ever [have] 20-minute battles.”

The speed also ties in with how the game’s multiplayer works, which is quicker and simpler than in something like Pokémon Go. There’s no lobby. You just tap an icon when you’re ready to fight a monster and the game will send you names of players nearby who are ready to join. Then, you can have up to four people fighting at the same time by pressing again.

Niantic

It’s worth noting that, early on in the beta, the game isn’t especially difficult. While you have access to a number of weapons and can track down resources, forge new weapons and armor, upgrade the supplies you have, and use power-ups, you don’t need to do any of that. You can easily defeat most enemies by tapping the screen repeatedly. Over time, Kawai says players will track down more challenging monsters — apparently four- and five-star monsters are more or less impossible for individual players to take down by themselves.

According to Tsujimoto, this is done to help players get accustomed to the game’s interface in the beginning stages, but it doesn’t last especially long.

“An important element of an action game is that you learn from your mistakes when you can’t beat a certain monster,” says Tsujimoto. “You learn whether you made the wrong move, whether you used the wrong weapon, and so on. And we think that this game has the right progression for the player to learn what they need to do in order to defeat those monsters.”

The beta doesn’t allow players to purchase the game’s currency, instead doling out a certain amount per day for free (used for items like Potions to refill health, Well-Done Steak to increase your life bar temporarily, and a Wander Orb to increase the size of the area where you can find things while exploring), so it’s hard to judge how well the game will balance its difficulty progression and monetization at this point.

What’s next

How the game evolves after its early phases is a big question. The game will allow players to create and customize new armor, weapons and gear. We also know that they can find and fight larger and more challenging monsters. But I was only able to cover the first hour of the beta for this story, so it’s hard to say how different the game will feel as you increase your rank over time.

Niantic has also said that it will make some changes to the game before its September release, which means we could see more features being added in between now.

You like to cook?

“We’re not going to talk about it today,” says Kawai with a laugh.

“With regards to Palico, obviously there are lots of opportunities to develop new elements, and we’re very much excited to explore those,” adds Sunano.

Regardless, I’m pretty happy with the game as it exists now. Much like Pokémon, the Monster Hunter license feels like a natural fit for a map-based game, and exploring to find monsters and dig up bones, metals, and crystals feels much stronger narratively than, say, walking to grow plants in Pikmin BlossomYou can either collect crystals or a special item to improve your stamina. NBA All-World.

If you want to, you can throw paintballs at monsters stored in the Rolodex. Sometimes convenience takes precedence.