Eurogamer had an exclusive interview with Monster Hunter series producer Ryōzō Tsujimoto and Monster Hunter Rise director Yasunori Ichinose.
During the interview it was confirmed by Mr. Tsujimoto that the impressive looking Nintendo Switch exclusive has been in development at Capcom for four years.
Development started on the Switch title before Monster Hunter World was created, however, Mr. Tsujimoto said that they didn’t really explore whether Monster Hunter World would work on Switch as he says that they treat each title as its own concept. He went on to say that you can not “ignore the hardware you’re releasing it on when you design the game.”
How long has Monster Hunter Rise been in development?
Ryōzō Tsujimoto:
It’s been about four years in total. Ichinose was the director of Monster Hunter Generations, which came out about four or five years ago. And we did give him a bit of time off after that! It wasn’t like the next day! But we asked him if he could work on the next portable – at the time it hadn’t been released – Switch title.
And we also had to consider what engine to use at the same time before we get started. We’re using the RE Engine which at the time had not yet been released, because the first title using it was Resident Evil 7. So yeah, long story short it was a total of about four years once we got all those ducks in a row.
So development started before Monster Hunter World came out. Did you ever explore the option of bringing that to Nintendo Switch?
Ryōzō Tsujimoto:
To be honest not really, because we do treat each title as its own concept and you can’t ignore the hardware you’re releasing it on when you design the game. If you’ve got something like Nintendo Switch which is pick up and play, you can play it anywhere, you don’t necessarily want the same gameplay experience which is designed assuming you’re sitting in front of a big TV on a sofa for four hours straight.
We want to be able to design a game that you can pick up for 30 minutes on the go, before bed, and get something out of that experience, and that that really affects the gameplay design and you can’t just bring that over and have it be the same, so we never really considered that when it came to Monster Hunter World.
