Artwork and Photography courtesy of Steamforged, copyright Capcom
MONSTER SPEED DATING
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.
We asked Alex Hall to put together his top five monsters from the game.
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 GREAT JAGRAS
THE HUNT BEGINS
“I can’t not put him in there. I think all of the monsters work really well within the video game. I think a really fun challenge with Jagras was he is ultimately your tutorial monster, so making that work and making sure it’s engaging and shows off the mechanics is key. So he’s got like some stomping around attacks. He’s got some ranged attacks, he’s got some attacks where he just kind of stands in one place and rolls around and he’s kind of encapsulates all that into one.”
Mat Hart, co-founder and creative lead at Steamforged gives us the game in broad strokes.