The current top post on the Monster Hunter subreddit, with nearly 4,000 upvotes, is simply titled WE DEFEATED GENDER completely bereft of any context. Thankfully just below it is the news that Monster Hunter players have been waiting to hear for years: for the first time in Wilds, armor designs will no longer be locked between male and female characters.
"In previous Monster Hunter games, male and female armor were separate," said one of Capcom's developers during an hour-long livestreamed presentation at Gamescom today. "I'm happy to confirm that in Monster Hunter Wilds, there's no more male and female armor. All characters can wear any gear."
Key to the "loop" of Monster Hunter is fighting the same beasts many times over to collect their body parts to use in the crafting of better armor and weapons. While the armor you craft from, say, famed series wyvern Rathalos has the same stats regardless of your character's gender, its physical appearance is completely different. Male armor broadly leans bulkier, while female armor generally tends to show more skin—shocking, I know. That's not the case with every armor set, but often the designs were quite different. That was frustrating with players who loved the look of, say, the female Rathalos Alpha armor set but happened to be playing a male character.
In Monster Hunter: World you had to use a one-time free character edit voucher to change your character's gender and design, and pay up $3 for another one after that. While Monster Hunter Rise dropped the terms male and female, the armor differences between body "type 1" and "type 2" remained, with the same character voucher restriction in place.
Wilds may still end up requiring you to pony up a couple bucks for a voucher to redesign your character, but now that armor designs are no longer locked to body type, one of the key reasons to do so is gone. Presumably Monster Hunter's "layered armor" system will also be returning in Wilds, letting you visually wear one type of armor while retaining the stats of another set underneath.
All that is to say, get ready for Monster Hunter fans to show off their hunting fashion like never before when Wilds comes out next year. "Fashion game is officially the endgame," Capcom's community manager Jonno Stanton quipped during the stream. He's not wrong.
