It only took 14 years, but with Monster Hunter: World, the rest of the, uh, world finally understood what Japanese players had been obsessing over. World was not just a hit, it was a massive hit, becoming Capcom’s best-selling game ever. Instead of immediately pivoting to a sequel, Capcom has continued to update World with new quests, gears, and monsters. And with this fall’s Iceborne expansion, Capcom is basically delivering a sequel; the winter-themed map will reportedly be bigger than anything featured in previous games.

Our conversation started as soon as I walked in the room, after one of the public relations representatives for Capcom asked me what my favorite weapon in the game was (hammer, obviously), and then informed me one of the people I’d be talking to shared the very same preference.

Some of the people keeping Monster Hunter going are producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and executive director/art director Kaname Fujioka, both of whom I spent some time speaking to last week. Their answers were as humorous as they were interesting, shedding light on the game’s development process, the series’ distinct lack of spiders (there’s a good reason!), what it means to depict the suffering of animals in a game about hunting, and much more.

It’s been more than a year since I’ve ventured into the wild in search of meat and loot, but my hour spent with Iceborne at E3 reminded me why it was one of my favorite games from 2018. The thrill of working together with friends to take down a kaiju-sized creature within seconds of the in-game timer running out, the despair of watching the next dismantle your strategy within minutes, sending you back to the drawing board. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience.

Take something like the hammer, which we just mentioned. You can't guard with it. There will be situations where you want to guard but you can't, and you need to make a decision how to handle that during the action. If you're going to say we're going to release new content, we want to think "Let's upgrade the hammer. Let's add some more options, add some more strategies to it." The solution isn't "add guarding" just because it can't. It wouldn't be the hammer if you could guard. The solution is to find other ways to give players cards in their deck, so to speak. “OK, when this situation comes up, I'm going to need to get out of the way to avoid damage. How do I do that, being a hammer user?”

Fujioka: It's not like I'm directly involved in each and every weapon for every single aspect of the tuning of them personally. For the team who do that stuff, I tell them, as a kind of philosophy: “You have to find the core pillar of each weapon's gameplay and not betray that as you make decisions about how to design and adjust the gameplay.”

Taking Monster Hunter: World as an example. In early stages of the game, they needed tutorial monster, so to speak, to show you this is what it's like to hunt a monster. They have relatively simple attacks, easy tells—when it does this, you know it's going to charge at you, you get out of the way, and don't take damage, and then you just keep attacking it. What wouldn't be appropriate at the start of the game is a monster that needs you to pull out every tool in your deck. You need to gradually get better at the game, as you keep playing. On that curve—not just a difficulty curve, but also game layout—we're placing each required role, so to speak, before we even get to the point of deciding which monster goes into which one.

Fujioka: We have a layout of the structure of the game we have to design first. We need a framework for what kind of monster is going to be needed at each stage of the game. They all have a different role to play.

Could you talk about the designing of a new creature? Obviously, it's a really big deal to have a new monster in the game. Does it start from "This is a cool design! How will it work in the game?" or is it "We have an idea for a gameplay concept, how do we design a monster around that?"

Every weapon should, and hopefully does, feel different in terms of its best range of attack and its rate of fire. The pace at which you get in and out from the monster—get up close, attack and get away, stay up close for a while and then retreat, stay at a distance—they all have a completely different feel, I think. There's a different combination of factors for each weapon. I make sure the designers don't stray too far from each weapon's own particular [identity], and that means they can stay unique and true.

I think if we can keep that philosophy intact, we can have all the weapon types feel unique, while also complementary as a whole arsenal in the game, rather than, in the process of improvement over the years, they don't start to merge together.

That means later in the game we might have one where, for example, [it's] not just harder to beat, but this monster at this stage, unless you use non-weapon items to get it ready to be attacked, you won't really do very well. That's going to expand your horizons. "I can't just be attacking all the time in this game, I need to remember I have these useful tools I can use, whether it's trapping or so forth." Gradually, the player will build up the amount of things that they've learned, and then we can start letting the later monsters [be set up to] let the player choose what they want to use on it.

"I suppose if I had to pick something about the difference in the players [worldwide], it would be that Japanese players tend to be more cooperative in the team in the sense that they treat the idea of co-op gameplay as not just 'four of us will all attack the monster at once'"

Once we have our framework in mind, the next stage is to think about the flow of how the different stages are introduced in the game. In the case of Monster Hunter: World, you start off in the Ancient Forest, keep on to the Wildspire Waste, [then] to Coral Highlands. Each one expanded in turn, and that meant we were introducing different monsters in each stage. Their design is going to reflect where you're going to meet them.