The opening hours of Monster Hunter Wilds are a shotgun blast of new information for returning hunters. Before I had even a handful of hunts under my belt, Capcom had dazzled me with cool quality-of-life upgrades like Seikrets, base camps, weapon holsters, makeshift camps, and seamless quest creation. "This is so much faster," I thought. "Capcom really gets what longtime players want!"
But around the eight-hour mark, I started to ask a question I was afraid to know the answer to: These on-map base camps are neat, but does that mean Wilds has no centralized village? That kinda stinks. The benefits of Wilds' streamlining are easy to spot, but its victims are smaller details that gave the series, and especially World, its personality. Wilds has no one place my hunter calls home—no dedicated headquarters for all things questing, crafting, melding, farming, gathering, and cooking. It's that last one that stings worst of all.
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