Sure, with a name like Monster Hunter, it’s pretty clear what your goal is throughout the series: hunt monsters to gear up for even bigger and badder beasties later down the line. However, ask any avid hunter and they’ll tell you that the true goal is to look the best when out in the field. It’s good news then that Monster Hunter Wilds is finally removing the series’ staple of incredibly restrictive and annoying gender-locked armor.
During an official Monster Hunter Wilds developer livestream at Gamescom 2024, Capcom has revealed that the beast-battling RPG is changing its approach to armor and customization. Notably, “all characters can wear any gear.”
“In previous Monster Hunter games, you had male and female armor. It was separate. However, we are happy to confirm that in Monster Hunter Wilds there is no more male and female armor.”
As noted by the developer, prior entries featured both a masculine and a feminine version of each armor set. Sometimes these would simply be adjustments for differences in body shapes, though on occasion these were effectively fundamentally different designs. This made creating the exact look you wanted a difficult task as you would be forced to wear either version depending on your character.
Now though, if you’ve got a certain look you like, you can use it no matter what choices you made during character creation. Not only is this great for the true endgame – fashion – but it also just to lets you play however you like, without needless restrictions.
You can see this in action during the stream in which the developer swaps between the different versions of a gear set. Clearly, at least for armor sets returning in Wilds from previous entries, there are still two versions but you can use either one. Though it’s yet to be confirmed, it would be surprising to see new armor designs break away from this and simply use more gender-neutral designs, though it is a possibility.
Nevertheless, it’s a great change that finally resolves a long-running criticism of Monster Hunter’s core progression system and gear design. Now we’ve just got to patiently await the Monster Hunter Wilds release date so we can finally get our hands on the promising follow-up, but until then why not check out the best games like Monster Hunter to tide you over?
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