Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak devs on balancing new monsters, weapons, and mechanics

Monster Hunter Rise’s new Sunbreak expansion is scheduled to hit Nintendo Switch June 30, 2022. In advance of that release, Shack News has conducted an interview with series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and Sunbreak director Yoshitake Suzuki.

The two of them give some great insight into the process of adding and balancing new features to an existing Monster Hunter title. Below, find a summary of what we learned about the Sunbreak development process.

• New monsters are required to be “fresh and innovative”, bring new gameplay elements, and work well within the game’s system
• Feedback from the community was taken into account for changes to the game, but no details on what those are just yet
• Heavy developer testing and player statistics are key to ensuring new weapons are balanced with old ones
• The new Citadel environment was designed to reflect design elements of the new monsters, to give a unified feeling to players (how monsters move through the world and how they behave was given a lot of thought)
• Switch Swap system has been expanded with ‘switch skill swap’ and ‘swap evade’ mechanics, allowing players to experiment and change their strategies up quickly
• New ‘follower’ quests are designed to allow solo players to experience the feeling of playing online multiplayer, and to highlight interesting side characters

Click here to read the full interview!