The recent Nintendo Direct Partner Showcases haven’t been filling gamers with a lot of confidence. However, the last one finally bucked that trend when it revealed major titles like Monster Hunter Rise and Monster Hunter Stories 2. Both of these are exclusive entries in the Monster Hunter saga, and so gamers are likely to enjoy them.
What might surprise you though is that developer Capcom has been working on Monster Hunter Rise for quite some time. This was revealed in a Eurogamer interview, producer Ryozo Tsujimoto spoke about the development time put into the title:
“It’s been about four years in total. Ichinose was the director of Monster Hunter Generations, which came out about four or five years ago. And we did give him a bit of time off after that! It wasn’t like the next day! But we asked him if he could work on the next portable – at the time it hadn’t been released – Switch title. And we also had to consider what engine to use at the same time before we get started. We’re using the RE Engine which at the time had not yet been released, because the first title using it was Resident Evil 7. So yeah, long story short it was a total of about four years once we got all those ducks in a row.”
Indeed. Now, this also raises the questions that many have wondered about whether this was the reason that Monster Hunter World didn’t come to the Switch, and he had an answer for that:
“To be honest not really, because we do treat each title as its own concept and you can’t ignore the hardware you’re releasing it on when you design the game. If you’ve got something like Nintendo Switch which is pick up and play, you can play it anywhere, you don’t necessarily want the same gameplay experience which is designed assuming you’re sitting in front of a big TV on a sofa for four hours straight. We want to be able to design a game that you can pick up for 30 minutes on the go, before bed, and get something out of that experience, and that that really affects the gameplay design and you can’t just bring that over and have it be the same, so we never really considered that when it came to Monster Hunter World.”
