Post Script
Is there more to life than hit points?
Whatever the shape or size of a target in Monster Hunter, one thing is guaranteed: a successful hunt is one in which you’ve reduced the beast’s hit points to zero, or close enough that you could capture them. And to ensure the fight feels sufficiently epic, those HP pools are massive. Victory is a matter of death by a thousand cuts, or perhaps a hundred hammer blows. In Wilds, as ever, there’s no visible health bar revealing how much work remains before you can claim your prize, but if you keep attacking, the damage numbers keep pouring out, and you know you’re heading in the right direction.
Such systems are employed by other games that feature combat as part of their experience, adding up to a rather large number themselves. Whether the relevant digits are displayed on screen or not, most battles we participate in revolve around subtractions from a starting HP total until one side reaches zero. Even the firstperson shooter – a genre built in part on the equalising purity of the headshot – has not been immune to this more mathematical approach.