Another eight minutes of Monster Hunter: World gameplay was set loose this week, taking players on a tour of the only zone that’s primarily home to death and decay, the Rotten Vale. We’re also introduced to the Radobaan, a tar-like monster that coats itself with bones it finds scattered across the Vale.
The Rotten Vale is vastly different from the other zones we’ll explore in Monster Hunter: World. For starters, it's not home to a lush array of flora and fauna like other habitats. The Vale is a place of death. It’s not quite Monster Hunter ’s Blighttown —well, we know it won’t poison you constantly, but we won’t know about system performance until next week—but Capcom says hunters should expect to find much more resilient monsters among the corpses and other detritus. On the plus side, it looks like players will also find salvageable remains of recently-deceased monsters in the Vale. Sometimes that will mean fending off nearby scavengers, but that’s a small price to pay for crafting materials.
The Rotten Vale (like all of World’s zones) will also be home to many unique creatures, including the bone-covered Radobaan. Given its description, we hope to see more than one form of tar monster when Monster Hunter: World hits consoles later this month. If you think about it, it would be almost impossible for a pair of Radobaans to look alike after a few hours/days/weeks collecting bones. How many giant ornamental horns, like the ones on the creature in this week’s footage, are you going to find in close proximity to each other? Wouldn’t a second Radobaan have to mold itself differently to make better use of other bones from the fallen creature(s) its pack stumbled upon?
To get another early look at Monster Hunter: World, take a few minutes to watch the new Rotten Vale footage from Capcom. Then head down to the comments and let us know which zone you’re most excited to explore when Monster Hunter returns later this month.
Monster Hunter: World is in development for PS4, Xbox One and PC. The game hits consoles on Jan. 26 and is scheduled to charge onto Steam sometime this fall.
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