What's the reason behind Seikret mount introduction? Monster Hunter Wilds Producer Ryozo Tsujimoto explains (Exclusive)

Monster Hunter Wilds’ producer Ryozo Tsujimoto was in attendance at Gamescom Asia 2024, and we were lucky enough to speak to him about the game. The next Monster Hunter franchise entry has fans worldwide excited, and some pretty major additions are coming to the game - such as a mount!

The Seikret bird mount is a huge change to an already colossal game, but how did it come to be? While chatting with Ryozo Tsujimoto about Monster Hunter Wilds, we learned just how this creature was developed.

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Ryozo Tsujimoto reveals how lessons learned in World influenced the Seikret mount in Monster Hunter Wilds

Ryozo Tsujimoto gave us some insights on what was learned from previous games (Image via Sportskeeda)

While talking to Ryozo Tsujimoto about Monster Hunter Wilds and the lessons learned from previous games, we learned how the Seikret mount came to be. Sportskeeda's Angshuman Dutta asked the question for me, which was answered through a translator:

“Monster Hunter World and its DLC achieved incredible popularity, becoming the best-selling game in the series. With the success of World and the release of Monster Hunter Rise in recent years, what key lessons or insights have you gained from those games that are helping shape and improve Wilds?”

It’s always interesting to learn what influences video game development changes, and Monster Hunter Wilds is no exception. I already felt Monster Hunter World was a pretty huge game, but apparently, people wanted something much bigger than that. It appears Capcom delivered as well, with Wilds. While fans were happy with the areas being interconnected, there was an issue with getting around:

“Definitely one of the lessons that they have learned from the development and also feedback of World is since World, one of the new components of World was that they connected the areas all together and you could move seamlessly within the areas of a larger map than before. One of the feedback was definitely some difficulty in navigating those large, expansive areas.”

Then the developers needed to balance the need for even larger areas against the need to make them easily explorable. While this posed a pretty serious challenge for the Monster Hunter Wilds developers, Ryozo Tsujimoto revealed that this was how the Seikret mount came to be in the game:

“So it kind of comes into play, the Seikret, as well as they heard that feedback in World. So even though they wanted to have bigger locales in Wilds, they thought, okay, this guy just isn't going to do it by itself. So then they added the Seikret.”

This, in turn, led to improving the navigational aspects of Monster Hunter Wilds, according to Ryozo Tsujimoto. Some technological advancements allowed for improved AI of this Seikret mount. Now you can use it to travel right to the monster you’re targeting, which ultimately, makes exploration far less stressful:

“One of the things they were able to do in Wilds was improve on the AI for the Seikret, which if you ride your Seikret and you just press one of the buttons, it does take you directly to the monster that you target. So with the improvements that they were able to make technologically, they were also then now able to implement onto the Seikret.”

That isn’t to say that “bigger areas” are the only lesson learned and the only improvement made to Monster Hunter Wilds. Ryozo Tsujimoto stated that there are a lot of other things that were iterated on, thanks to fan feedback. According to the game developer, experienced fans will notice some of this stuff as they explore the game:

“And to all the World and Iceborne fans out there, there are a bunch of, you know, smaller things that were improvements that were made upon after having experienced a lot of feedback from World. So he does think that experienced players will be able to see for themselves what those small changes are. “

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Monster Hunter Wilds launches on February 28, 2024, for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. It is a massive title with a brand-new region to explore and plenty of titanic monsters to try and bring down when it launches next year.