Feel my Rath.
Capcom is letting players 'try before they buy' Monster Hunter Wilds' on Switch 2, bringing the fairly generous 'Prologue demo' to the console before the game's full release on the platform on 4th December.
The demo, which arrives on 19th October, lets you play the very beginning of the game up to the beginning of Chapter 1-3,"To the Forest". It's offline-only, so you don't get to experience the full joy of four-player hunts - but you do at least get to try out all 14 weapon types, and get full access to the character creator. Also, your save data will migrate from the demo to the full game, similarly to how the demo pathing works on PC and other consoles.
Unlike other consoles, though, there is an option to play local multiplayer with the demo. This means if someone else nearby has the demo downloaded on their Switch 2, you'll be able to play with them - trying out some of the hunts in co-op (honestly, that is how the game is meant to be played, if you ask me). There has been quite a lot of speculation about how a game as massive as Monster Hunter Wilds - complete with all the controversy we saw about its performance over the year it launched - will run on Switch 2, so it's pretty neat that Capcom is giving you a chance to try it out for yourself.
For my money, a lot of the initial criticisms of Monster Hunter Wilds have been addressed since its shaky launch; Capcom has been fastidious in making sure the difficulty complaints were taken care of, and performance has been steadily enhanced, patch after patch. In fact, the developer even noted how the Switch 2 version of the game actually helped improve all the other versions, remarking on the "painstaking, seemingly endless process" it took to get the game in a shippable state on the hybrid console.
The Switch 2 release of the game represents another step on Capcom's journey towards making Wilds more popular than the esteemed Worlds - the publisher's end goal is "surpassing" the dizzying apex of Monster Hunter World's sales and popularity. To this end, it seems Capcom has all hands on deck with the upcoming expansion, Ascendance, something we're hoping to see more of in due course.
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