Nintendo fans who are looking forward to playing the latest Monster Hunter game on the go should probably stop holding their breath, as it seems that Monster Hunter World won't be coming to the Nintendo Switch.

Capcom President Haruhiro Tsujimoto has stated in an interview with Toyo Keizai (via Kotaku) that bringing Monster Hunter World to the Nintendo Switch would be "difficult." This is due to how different that the hardware of the Nintendo Switch is in design from the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with its focus on lower specifications in order to make the game playable in a portable fashion.

Monster Hunter World represented a huge leap for the series in terms of graphical fidelity and the scope & size of its levels. The old Monster Hunter games were never amazing looking games and their levels were broken into segments in order to make it easier for the portable entries in the series to cope with running everything smoothly. Monster Hunter World's massive stages that are teeming with life and giant creatures are probably too much for the Nintendo Switch to handle.

This isn't to say that we won't see any Monster Hunter games in the future that aren't exclusive to the Nintendo Switch. There was already an updated port of Monster Hunter Generations released for the system in Japan, which has yet to make it overseas. This was an odd choice, as the game likely would have sold a lot of copies during the Switch's first few barren months.

The Monster Hunter franchise found success on PlayStation systems, but the previous generation of games existed only on Nintendo consoles. Monster Hunter World has been a critical and commercial success for Capcom, but it shouldn't be forgotten that the series first found a significant audience in the west through Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on the Nintendo 3DS.

The continuing success of the Nintendo Switch and the hybrid nature of the console means that the system is perfect for a Monster Hunter game. Monster Hunter World has abandoned the notion of local-play between groups of players, which was the backbone of the series. It is not outside the realm of possibility that Monster Hunter titles will be developed exclusively for the Nintendo Switch, which will embrace the previous camaraderie of the older games in the series.

 

 

---