11 Monster Hunter Wilds features from the Gamescom dev streams that have me hooting and hollering like an inbound Bazelgeuse

At Gamescom, the developers of Monster Hunter Wilds have been hosting daily, hours-long livestreams, featuring lengthy gameplay demos of devs hunting in real time. With hours of new mechanics and features on display, this is basically a public holiday for Monster Hunter veterans—a beautiful cohort of beings with deeply addled brains, who love nothing more than to pick apart the implications for the next era of hunts.

After poring feverishly over the livestream footage and accompanying fanbase frenzy, here are a few of the features—new and returning, big and small—that I'm thrilled to see in Monster Hunter Wilds.

1. Stronger dung

Making use of every possible tool is one of the hunter's most important skills, and dung is no exception. In the ferocious ecology of Monster Hunter Wilds, large monsters can move as herds of hostile behemoths. Luckily, the humble Dung Pod (usually used to shoo away an unwelcome monster from the area) has gotten an upgrade to ensure that resourceful hunters don't end up outmatched. With a tactically-deployed stench cloud from a Large Dung Pod, the Monster Hunter devs sent whole packs of large monsters scattering at once so they could tackle their preferred target without getting overwhelmed.

What excites me about bigger dung—you can get paid while writing all kinds of sentences, it turns out—is that it'll let me test my mettle and see if I can battle a whole herd of monsters at once. If I can, excellent: I continue being very cool and strong. If I can't, I'll have a get out of jail free card with a terrible smell.

 2. A new era for fashion hunters

As we reported yesterday, Capcom confirmed on-stream that Wilds is doing away with gendered armor appearances. Sounds like a minor feature to the uninitiated, but restrictions around armor and body type have been a pain point with the series for going on 20 years. At last: My female hunter can experience the thrill of wearing an entire pair of pants. Meanwhile, my male hunter can explore his own platemail bikini. Monster Hunter has officially defeated gender. 

3. Seamless hunting

It was mentioned in early Monster Hunter Wilds previews, but the Gamescom livestreams let us see firsthand how starting a quest in Wilds can be as simple as stepping foot outside your camp and attacking a monster—no loading screens necessary. It's impressive how much more cohesive it makes the experience feel, and with deployable campsites, you're free to resupply and tackle your next hunt from the field without needing to return to the village.

You can also immediately end a quest once you've finished it, which will spare me the 60 seconds I've usually spent spinning in place while waiting for the end-of-quest timer to run out after finishing my carves.

 4. Automatic broken part collection 

I'm not listing this here for my sake, but rather for all the poor bastards I've betrayed by sheathing my weapons mid-fight to scramble around the room and make sure I've gathered all the shiny bits that have fallen off the monster. Suffer no more, comrades: In Wilds, I'll automatically be given those materials when we've broken a monster part. Same goes for materials produced by "destroying wounds" with the new Focus Mode.

The capture net's coming back, too, though, so I might stop fighting if I see a cool lizard to bring home. I can't be blamed for that.

5. 3D maps

Even after I've put dozens of hours into a Monster Hunter game, I'll still struggle with its maps. Monster Hunter's environments are multi-tiered, interconnected webs of glades, caves, and tunnels, and even on a good day it can be difficult to parse which ramps go up and which ones go down when you're flipping between the map's vertical levels.

Thankfully, both the full area map and the minimap in Wilds are 3D, letting players rotate the map in place to better read your target's relative elevation than the traditional top-down view. Should be harder for me to end up hundreds of meters below the ore outcrop I'm trying to mine.

6. This dual blades move

Dual Blades Focus Strike Move: Turning Tide from r/MonsterHunter

I mean, look at that shit. That's videogames.

This new longsword finisher is pretty rad, too. 

7. Specialized tools are back

Monster Hunter World introduced Specialized Tools: limited use items that provided powerful but temporary effects, like the Glider Mantle which allowed for riding on air currents and the Bandit Mantle that caused monsters to drop trade-in items when attacked.

In the demo livestreams, the devs began many of their hunts by donning the returning Ghillie Mantle, which lets the hunter avoid detection from monsters by camouflaging with the environment, indicating Wilds will have its own suite of Specialized Tools. The Ghillie Mantle also made for easy setup of another promising new feature: Sneak Attacks, which can be performed on an unaware monster to kick off a quest with a hefty chunk of damage.

8. By god, you can move (and throw) barrel bombs after placing them

This is, perhaps, the single greatest quality of life change ever provided for the buffoons of the world. As a man blessed with intermittent competence, I'm pleased to say that my barrel bombs only occasionally produce a comedy of errors. Even so, I'll welcome the chance to reposition my barrels when I realize I've placed them in a way that'll only really endanger myself.

Alternatively, you can just huck them at the monster directly, now. That works, too.

9. Luring Pods have big shenanigans potential 

A new form of slinger ammo, the Luring Pod, can be fired at a monster to temporarily draw its attention, potentially letting you lead it into traps and environmental hazards. Even better, you could split off during a multiplayer hunt to tag another monster in the region with a Luring Pod and draw it back to your target monster, triggering your own turf wars at will. 

10. The return of mounting 

Traditionally in Monster Hunter, doing enough damage to a monster from leaping attacks will cause you to mount it, with the monster trying to shake you off its back as you're hacking away at it and trying to send it toppling. In Rise, mounting was replaced with Wyvern Riding, which let you take direct control of a monster after it'd suffered enough aerial and Wirebug attack damage. As cool as it was to wrangle a monster and briefly control it like you're engaged in a titanic Pokemon battle, it meant almost every hunt was disrupted by at least one prolonged sequence where I wasn't able to do the bread and butter Monster Hunter combat I show up for.

Thankfully, Wilds looks like it's going back to mounting basics—get one, get some hits in, get off. However, the new Focus Mode mechanic seems to open up new mounted finishers; at one point a MonHun dev finished a mount by embedding his Charge Blade's spinning axe head in a monsters back before wrenching it loose in a dramatic dismount.

11. Hammer uppies confirmed

Hammer can still launch people from r/MonsterHunter

This counts as teamwork.