Upon receiving an award for best RPG at The Game Awards last week, Monster Hunter: World producer Ryozo Tsujimoto promised fans some news about the game’s future in the coming days. Well, that news has arrived and is quite the bombshell: Monster Hunter World will be getting an expansion in 2019.
Titled Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, the expansion will pick up from where the original story left off, bringing with it a new quest rank, monsters, locales, moves, and equipment. In particular, the announcement notes Iceborne will be the size of previously G or Ultimate entries in the series.
For fans who have been critical of the game’s general lack of monsters and lack of subjective difficulty, then this news couldn’t have come soon enough. As mentioned in a previous piece earlier this year, one of the game’s major weaknesses was the lack of endgame content, and while Arch-Tempered Elder Dragons helped to somewhat fill that void since then, they’re temporary and still shared much in common with their regular Tempered counterparts (they do have one or two new moves, at least). Meanwhile, the Tempered monsters that players would spend the majority of their time fighting were identical to regular monsters but with boosted stats and no new moves to speak of.
Of course, now we’re left to wonder what exactly we’ll be seeing once Iceborne arrives.
Presumably, we’ll be getting an ice zone, but it’s possible another might show up. Similarly, rumored monsters such as Oroshi Kirin and Alatreon have yet to show up in the base game, so they might appear in the expansion instead. In a similar vein, we could see more subspecies of both old and new monsters such as Barroth (Jade Barroth) and Legiana, as well as the return of old monsters in general, like Barioth or Gammoth.
Really, the sky’s the limit here, and considering just how much was done in the original, one can only imagine what Capcom will cook up for the expansion.
Monster Hunter World: Iceborne is slated to arrive in Fall 2019, with more info due out in Spring of the same year.
Check out the announcement trailer below:
Published: Dec 10, 2018 10:13 am