Wild Hearts is shaping up well on the accessibility front, too. Couple that with a cleaner UI, and this Wild Heats already has a better user experience - even just 30 minutes into a preview build I played months ahead of its launch. The king of this genre has an approachability problem, and Wild Hearts has a great chance of becoming the preferred option for new players thanks to how it handles player onboarding. I’ve tried to get into the mainline Monster Hunter series multiple times but always found the beginning of those games off-putting because of how daunting their openings and tutorials are. While a lot more pleased me afterward - like the colorful world design, attack damage numbers, and fact that Karakuri remains in the world map after a hunt to remind you of previous exploits - this opening is what stuck with me. Once I did that, another giant Kemono that looked like a giant rat with plants growing out of it attacked, and I set off on the first real hunt of the game, concluding the opening and kicking off the true Wild Hearts adventure. After escaping the cave, I used the Karakuri more traditionally to build a camp near a girl I found unconscious on the ground. Karakuri building skills are critically important when preparing for hunting large Kemono, too. To get out of this cave, I had to build up boxes of Karakuri to help me climb up a wall and then build more to create a vantage point I could aerially attack enemies from. During development, Koei Tecmo decided to make crafting in Wild Hearts not just a defensive or preparation thing but something that can help during exploration and fights. Then came the second part of the tutorial, which focused on this unique system. That’s when Mujina reappeared and activated my Karakuri, a little device my hunter found in the last hunt and carried with them. Unfortunately, this fight was impossible to win, so my character was defeated and tossed into a deep cave. I used the skills the game had effectively taught me by that point to hunt down the source, a giant ice wolf Kemono, and I engaged them in battle. During a discussion with them, I established my character’s backstory, customized their look, learned more about the Kemono, and got my first significant objective: go to the nearby town of Minato.īefore I could do that, though, the environment around us quickly changed and was overtaken by ice. I soon came across a mystical being calling themselves Mujina. The setup EA and Koei Tecmo settled on was already effective but wasn’t quite over yet. “A lot of the creative input and feedback we have given has been around tutorialization, onboarding, and clarity of features and UI to players.” The hunt continues “EA has a great wealth of experience in its user research division, and we were able to provide a huge amount of testing and data to Koei Tecmo that really helped them fine-tune the game and make critical decisions around their feature set,” Harvey said. According to EA Originals Executive Producer Lewis Harvey, this is the aspect of the game Koei Tecmo wanted to work closely with EA on, although EA provided some character and world design input to the Japanese development team at Omega Force as well. The best game openings get right into things, which Wild Hearts successfully does. Text boxes only appear if players choose to activate them when a tutorial pops up. These are some basic fundamentals in hunting games, but the difference compared to Monster Hunter Rise is that the game isn’t constantly stopping the player with long cutscenes or large text boxes to explain basic things. During this hunt, players will learn the basics of the camera and movement controls, the attacks at their disposal during combat, how to climb ledges with limited stamina, and how to sneak up on an enemy. Soon, a small-time hunt begins as the player spots a deer-like Kemono. Wild Hearts begins peacefully, with a lone hunter walking through a forest rife with small friendly Kemono creatures. We know that our players want to experience the game and world as soon as they can, so that was the fundamental approach we took with the opening.” “We wanted you to be able to play as soon as possible. “One thing that was very important to us was to not do a lot of explaining and then get into the story and gameplay,” Edagawa tells Digital Trends.
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