MONSTER HUNTER WORLD

Smashing monsters with Steamforged

Huge stomping monsters lumber across the lands of the New World, and you, dear hunter, are going to be asked to take down these giant beasts lest they cause a bio-magical disaster. “With what?” you might ask. Well, you might have a weapon in your hand, but you’re going to need to get some upgrade materials before you take on anything too massive – so maybe try bashing that smaller monster over there on the head before moving on.

And this is the core loop of the Monster Hunter series of videogames, smash up ancient and magical creatures for the resources they drop, so that you may craft new weapons that can smash up bigger monsters. Naturally, the team that are bringing this to our tabletops might know a little something about big monsters. Steamforged not only has a history of massive minis in games like Dark Souls: The Board Game and Horizon: Zero Dawn, they’ve also made some really big dragons for their RPG scenario line – Epic Encounters. We caught up with Mat Hart, Russ Charles and Alex Hall to talk about the making of this game of massive monster combat.

THE HUNT BEGINS

Mat Hart, co-founder and creative lead at Steamforged gives us the game in broad strokes.

“It’s a miniatures based game with a huge amount of tactical gameplay, but there is additional complexity built in through the way that you manage your resources, and those resources are the moves and abilities that your weapons and armour allow you to have access to,” says the designer, “and what you end up with in your hand and how you choose to play those card all revolve around the current game state – what all the other players are doing. We’re taking three or four fairly simple layers and smashing them together and create an enormously deep tactical and strategic challenge. And, of course, it’s all set in the world of Monster Hunter – hunting massive creatures, looking to take them down and harvesting them for useful things.”

For those uninitiated in the world of Monster Hunter’s digital offerings something may have just clicked in your brain about how well it’s going to translate from your Playstation 5 to your tabletop. Resources are at the heart of the series, and if there’s one thing that board gamers are really good at, it’s exchanging resources for something to get something else. Of course there’s more to the game than that, but there’s

a very simple line between the mechanics in one medium that can be – nearly – directly dropped on to the board.

After all, it’s certainly not the storyline of the games, as Monster Hunter superfan and Steamforged’s product owner for Monster Hunter World: The Board Game,

Alex Hall, attests, “the story, at least for me personally, isn’t a particularly strong part of the series. Generally speaking, for the most part, canonically within the series, you are some sort of ecologist that works for various different guilds and you are out there to try and maintain ecological balance. To make sure there aren’t too many big, scary monsters eating the little ones and you’re basically trying to maintain the food chain. The storyline within the video games is there’s a new, ‘big bad’ that is completely spoiling everything in the world, and you have the ultimate goal of going out and fixing and solving it,” says Hall, “usually taking the body count higher than I would assume a conventional ecologist might.”

“It’s like if the World Wildlife Fund were The Expendables,” chips in Russ Charles, Steamforged’s artistic lead with a laugh.

As you may expect with a game where conservationism that uses large pointy weapons as its main method of protecting local ecology is key, the game is a combat focused and uses a somewhat familiar system from previous Steamforged games. Players choose their hunter and enter the fight with the huge monster they’ve tracked. The arena is made of nodes, similar to Dark Souls: The Board Game,

but grander in scale. There are more points to move between, making positioning something more central to the game

“We wanted the additional nodes to make the arena that you you’re fighting the monster in feel bigger – and it just helps make the weapons feel more different. You just have more ranges to play around with,” says Hall, “the monster will have a deck of behaviour cards which will be familiar to anyone who has played with our various iterations of a boss led by AI. The information on that monster card tells the hunters how many of them get to activate and how many cards they’re allowed to play during their activation.”

The hunters will then take their turn, laying their cards down on their stamina board to make attacks. This limiting of player turns and activations is to feed into the ‘boss battle’ feeling that we’ve come to love from huge encounters in Steamforged games.

“So rather than it being a kind of turnbased ‘monster goes, one Hunter goes’ the number of hunters that get to go is dictated by the monster. This is to really try and feed this idea that the monster is the one that dictates the pace of this battle. Not the hunters. The monster is in control until it’s dead,” says Hall.

And as with any boss fight, the arena that the boss is in is part of the puzzle – “very often in these kinds of more boss fighty arena games, I feel like movement is very secondary,” says Hall, “by increasing the amount of nodes, the monster has more room to move around and there’s more distance between the hunters and the monsters. It feels like the movement is a massive part of the game, where there can be an occasion where the monster is on a node in the far corner. And you you’re up, thinking ‘I’m taking a turn here. What am I going to do? Because

I actually have to traverse this arena to get to the monster. Am I the right person to go?’”

“This kind of coincides with one of the core philosophies that we have at Steamforged that with regards to what makes a game fun is having lots of movement,” says Hart, “so if you look at any of our games, you won’t see a game where the board stays static.”

AUTHENTICALLY MONSTEROUS

Russ Charles is the man behind the monsters for Monster Hunter World: The Board Game, “We’ve probably started to gather a reputation as the company that makes the really big miniatures,” he says, “and, yeah, this one pushes the outside scale of what is reasonable and feasible even further.”

“We’re lucky in a way, with our relationship with Capcom. They were very open. And clearly what you want to do is you want to make the visual experience and the tactile experience as authentic as possible. There are necessary changes that you’re going to need to make between something that appears on the screen and something that appears as a scale bound piece of plastic,” says the sculptor, “that said, the sheer size of the monsters has meant that we can stay very authentic to the end game designs. And Capcom were very kind, we were able to use as reference the many millions and millions of polygons of high level sculpts that were done for the game to capture all of the high resolution textures.”

In terms of fidelity then, there’s a real push towards absolute authenticity, “they would share animation files so that we could look at specific animation frames as the starting point for specific miniatures poses,” says Charles, “for the monsters, we were able to get an incredible level of sort of authenticity and fidelity.”

“It’s quite funny, for our initial work on the game for early discussions one of our sculptors, Ben, produced The Great Jagras, entirely based off screenshots. And when we got the official high resolution models from the game the amount of changes we had to make were quite tiny,” he says with a laugh, “of course, for some of the monsters, if it’s got wings for example, you’ve got to do stuff about the thickness of the membranes and claws and teeth, they’re little things. But for the most part if there is an armour plate or a cyst or a scale on the Rathalos in a certain place in the video game, it’s in the same place on the miniature.”

Of course, not everything in the game can be massive, and the hunters of the game went through an entirely different process – one we’re more familiar with in miniature games of making them stay true to the spirit of the source material while compromising on what Charles calls, “the engineering realities of plastic.”

The buzz in the team is really something to behold, “it’s an amazing project – how often do I get to make a

It’s an amazing project – how often do I get to make a dragon with a wingspan that’s over a foot?

dragon with a wingspan that’s over a foot?” say Charles, to which I suggest every other month – citing the huge dragon found in one of the Epic Encounters boxes, “the Red Dragon, I think is still our biggest Epic Encounter miniature. And honestly the dragons in this game make that guy looked like a little puppy, easily.”

HERE BE MONSTERS

There’s two core boxes for the game, containing four monster and four hunters each, meaning your choice in flavour comes down to your monster preferences. On top of this there’s a hunters expansion box and then additional monster expansion boxes for more Elder Dragons – the ultimate bosses of the game that can be swapped in for a twist of extra challenge.

“We designed the game partly with the Kickstarter in mind,” says Hart, “but mostly with the retail release and the breakdown of different boxes. What we wanted to make sure is that each of the boxes, half the hunters and the monsters in them are standalone playable content. So, in effect they’re two core boxes and you can pick whichever ones you, you liked the look of.”

This presented its own challenges of course “that’s where Alex carefully picked the monsters that he thought would represent those biomes well, but also provide a nice scaling of challenge while also including the monsters which would generate the

correct kind of resources for the hunters that we wanted to put in that particular box. So it was actually quite a neat balancing act in the end,” continues Hart, while Alex Hall pulls the slightly pained face of someone who had to create a spreadsheet of monsters.

“I wish it was as simple as when we kind of landed on the basic breakdown of the box,” says Hall, “as ideal as it would be that every monster you kill in monster Hunter, you can create any one of the weapons from the parts from that monster. That is not how it works.”

“So it might be that you can, you can create six weapons from killing a Great Jagras, and there’s only six weapons you can make. So ideally the box that has the Great Jagras in it for the hunters we’d put in, it are some of those six. And that was the balancing act of kind of landing on the right hunters with the right weapons in the box.”

This is then confounded further by the fact that your weapons present the archetypes of the classes you’re able to play in Monster Hunter World: The Board Game. Naturally the team wanted a good spread in every box, so ensuring the right difficulty curve, the right monsters and the right resources from those monsters could create the right weapons was key.

OVERCOMING THE MONSTER

So how do we win? In a game where the source material has an element of grind about it, it might feel like a sandbox. Instead here, we have the game broken into three sections, the first being a choose your own path style book

“Some of the resources will come from, from the choose your own adventure sections. So part of the decision of the path, you choose to go down, maybe to progress towards like finding tracks, you find your monster and then you may be tempted something else, like ‘but I need these bones and we could pick that one and I could get those bones,’” says Hall, then there’s the hunt or the fighting phase, followed by a phase where you can upgrade your gear and craft new equipment.

Part of the game’s success will be in emulating the game beyond the ‘boss rush’ elements, making you put in the effort to find the creature before conflict begins.

“You have to put in the legwork,” says Hall, “you don’t just load in and it’s directly in of you and it’s never going to run away. And it just stands in front of you until you’re dead or it’s dead. You have to put in some legwork in there at the start, which makes it even more irritating when it kills you and even more satisfying when you kill it, because it hasn’t just been handed to you. You’ve had to work for it a bit.”

Once the dust has settled and the monsters have been hunted to a manageable degree, what will make this game a victory? For Hart, it’s all about how the game lives in people’s mind while they’re at the table.

“I think the key thing for me, and it’s something we have sort of talked about a little bit before is how effective the individual game play layers are in terms of being able to explain to you the combat system,” says Hart, “you know, you place cards down, you build combos – but then, then you go one step beyond that and you say, well, I could build a massive combo. Yes you could. But now you’re reducing the amount of ability you have to dodge. Well, that’s not a problem if you’ve managed to position yourself into the right place and you know what the monster

is likely to be doing. And now you need to start learning what the monster is likely to be doing. It just flows into this wonderful kind of game experience that just – that just has such depth to it. And yet you’ve got five slots on your board and you’re just playing cards into that to build a combo up.”

“So that’s the bit that I think is for me most exciting and the aspect I’m probably the most proud of from a design point of view. But then as, as Russ said, the other side of it with the visuals is how on point they are like so on point that the, we actually had a conversation with Capcom and they wanted to know how had we got the the minis to be that perfect,” continues Hart, “And we were like, “well, is this a problem?” and it turns out it’s not a problem of course, but they tongue in cheek said, “well, we’re not going to sign off on anything until you tell us how you did it.” So, we actually had to sit down and talk them through what our full pipeline is and how we go about creating these renditions of models from video games. And I think it just shows the level of experience that we’ve got with this kind of development.”

“I think Monster Hunter World: The Board Game really is a pinnacle of a lot of experience that Steamforged has been working towards,” says the designer, “we’re constantly evolving and we’re constantly growing and we’re constantly looking to push the envelope for higher and further away from ourselves and Monster Hunter and quantum leap forward for us in terms of complexity of game play, and yet ease of access and quality of minis and components. For me, it’s an absolute triumph.”

WHAT’S NEXT?

The Kickstarter should be live as you read this, with a retail release down the line. But aside from triumphing over the monster, what’s next for the studio?

“More Epic Encounters if I’m lucky,” quips Charles. Hart suggests Bardsung is his next focus, but not only the miniatures dungeon crawl game itself – but the possibility of a standalone RPG to go alongside it. Speaking of roleplaying, Charles waves the new core book for Animal Adventures, at us through the screen – a book which will be arriving with backers very soon.

Until then, we’ll be keeping an eye out for the next big tracks from the studio. *