Long-Standing Problems of Monster Hunter as "Nature Simulator"

Disclaimer: I have not played MH Wilds, but this is mostly about previous games.

Monster Hunter has always had excellent combat fundamentals, but its relationship with other systems has been more strained. As priorities shift, many have started to complain that the aspects of Monster Hunter meant to induce connection with the environment have been diluted or lost. While I don't totally disagree, its implementation has always had fundamental problems.

The series's structure originating in Monster Hunter 1 is broadly modeled on Phantasy Star Online, an extremely popular Japanese MMO released four years prior. The player enters maps via a quest and goes from room to room, killing weak enemies who get in the way, gathering resources by walking around and hitting a button, and occasionally fighting large bosses. What I do understand is how this creates a connection between you and the environment: you need to do something repetitious requiring a basic level of familiarity with the space. Slowness, repetition, even monotony are core human emotions and not intrinsically bad to induce, though they are used callously and carelessly in almost all games.

What I am not convinced of is that this is a robust or faithful way to represent being in nature. Of course you will never be able to capture the all-important physical sensations: the smell and feel of the air, the crunch of leaves, so on. But one can still use game systems to create other senses of "physicality" that abstractly analogize. The 2012 first person exploration/survival game Miasmata has a walking model that strongly takes into account terrain angle, slowing your steps or sliding you down on even relatively shallow slopes. It's not realistic as a simulation, but the way the character movement constantly reflects the landscape mirrors how your body silently provides feedback and sensation from the ground beneath you when hiking a trail.

Monster Hunter's gathering doesn't do anything like this, because it has always been working backwards. It took the MMO grindy plug-and-play structure which is carried by social elements (and nakedly compulsive ones, but that's not a hill I want to die on here) and attempted to retroactively refit it into a quasi-hunter-gatherer simulator. Historically, even this veneer is dropped when MH1's multiplayer hub descends into "kill 20 Kut-Ku" style rank progression gates.

"Preparation" frankly exists as a raw pacing modifier, with many of the actual "decisions" involved either being impetus to grind (spend 10 hunts making an armor set) or simply trivial (bring a cold drink in a hot area when inventory space has almost never been a real constraint on players). Slowing down pacing isn't categorically bad, but this doesn't seem like an elegant or robust solution to me.

Moreover, it's difficult to imagine what could be changed to accomplish this goal without core system reworks. This appeal probably needs to be constructed outside of the combat layer, because the mechanical core of Monster Hunter is the fighting game esque precise interaction of hitboxes which don't play nice with complicated naturalistic terrain (hence the recent environmental traps which at least provide a superficial aesthetic solution). Rain World is the obvious and jarring example of a game whose player and enemy movement does deeply interact with uneven terrain, precisely because it was built from the ground up to do that, precisely because creating a viscerally-felt representation of nature was a foundational goal of the game.

I do think there is some potential for improvement within the constraints: MH2 at least showed a good-faith effort to somewhat reduce the blatant grindiness of MH1 while reorienting the structure and contextualization of the game around helping build up your small village, and MH World expanded significantly on the wildlife's density and interactions in each map.

But the general tenor of the approach since MHFU has been "defeatist" design; retaining the core structure but making changes to streamline and/or subvert it: a good thing for bypassing the egregious pacing of older games and just experiencing the combat, but a bandaid for experiencing the world.

These elements remain partially because it would be a lot of design work to cut them out, but also because they at least aesthetically or representationally maintain the qualities of the series which are core to its fantasy, however flawed it may be. My guess is that good solutions do exist, but they aren't accessible to a team on a strict development cycle who seem to be looking more towards modern AAA-isms for the path forward than anything else.