A fresh wave of previews and discussion for Monster Hunter Wilds Ascendance has inspired me to dive back into the action. If you’ve been feeling the same, it’s an ideal time to revisit some of the older entries, and if you started with Wilds and haven’t played Monster Hunter World before, then it’s the perfect excuse to do exactly that. Hunting is better with friends, of course, and now there’s a new mod designed to make the notoriously awkward experience of playing through the campaign as a co-op game a whole lot smoother.
Monster Hunter World is simply magnificent, its Iceborne expansion even more so, and I’d recommend it without hesitation even despite the flaws. If you’ve ever tried to play through the main story of the RPG with friends, however, you’ll be well aware that it’s the most frustrating part of the entire game. It’s bad enough if you’re an established player escorting a newcomer through, and even worse if everyone involved is a first-timer.
You can’t hang out in the majority of town, with your squad only visible in the designated Gathering Hub. The process of posting and joining quests is laborious, and you can’t actually take on the most important missions together unless you first start them separately, play through the opening section, and then quit after finding your target. Only then are you able to team up in the same world. These are the flaws modder ‘Huntardy’ has aimed to iron out with the newly released ‘Monster Hunter World Seamless Co-op mod.’
The mod comes with a full set of toggles to determine which features you want to use. You can enable the ability to all run around the entire hub in Astera together as you craft, eat, and sort out your farms. You can enable auto-joining for quests posted by the session host (or anyone in the lobby, if you prefer), and optionally the ability to match their chosen starting campsite, or use a voucher automatically for bonus rewards if you have one available.
Perhaps most usefully, you can choose to bypass that troublesome ‘cutscene gate’ – the thing that blocks you from joining main-story Assignments until everyone has been through the early minutes and initiated the cutscene revealing the monster. There’s a second setting that will play any cutscenes the quest leader sees; the creator notes there were some initial issues with this, but they’re in the process of ironing that out.
The Monster Hunter World seamless co-op mod is available now. You can download it via Nexus Mods, where you’ll find instructions to install and use it. Note that you and all the players you want to team up with must all be running the same version of the game and the mod. The creator adds that most of their testing has been with two-player groups, so any feedback relating to three-player and four-player, along with more testing of Iceborne content, is “especially useful” in honing its functionality.
While this is an initial release, it’ll certainly be welcome news for anyone considering a fresh Monster Hunter World playthrough with friends. The clunkiness of its default setup is enough that my pals and I ended up deciding to just do the main story solo and only team up for farming investigations and the endgame, rather than go through the effort of bouncing in and out of missions; now, you won’t have to make that decision. You can also take a look at my Monster Hunter Wilds Ascendance preview if you want a glimpse of what’s next for the series.