One year and 15 million players later, Niantic is finally adding a killer missing feature to Monster Hunter Now - and it’s going to make hunting so much easier
Earlier this year, Hunt-a-thons were improved by the ability to matchmake with hunters around the world. Now, regular hunts are getting better.
Monster Hunter Now is good. Long-time readers of the site will know my opinion on the game from the often-gushing articles I’ve published over the past year. But from Summer Game Fest 2023, when I first played the game and fell in love, Niantic has improved the mobile title immeasurably.
Initially, the roster of monsters on offer - and the overall flavour of the multiplayer gameplay - was limited. Unless you had IRL friends to go and hunt with, you were locked into playing most of the game in single-player, which means grinding out high-end monsters and often getting backed into progression bottle-necks if you couldn’t slay certain beasts.
It was a relief, then, when Niantic introduced the ability to matchmake with other players earlier this year. It’s all very passive, and that’s kind of the point. If you load into a Hunt-a-thon that’s taking place at your local Post Office, say, and no one else is around in the real world, the game will now automatically find other players that are waiting in lobbies around the world for you to kill a Barioth with.
With absolutely no extra work or button-clicking on your part, you’re suddenly teamed up with a lance user from Berlin, a sword and shield user from London, and a bow user from Seoul. The job’s a goodun, and you’re breaking fangs and hewing off tails before you know it. All you need to do is find a hunt and take part.
But this has been limited to Hunt-a-thons. That means you can't play with players around the world to defeat that tricky 8-star Mizutsune in your local park. You can’t get some randoms in to bash the horns of a Radobaan. You can’t recruit bow users to shred the wings of a Rathalos whilst you work on separating its tail from its body. It’s a problem, and makes the game feel quite lonely.
Well, good news! As of Friday, June 26, a new feature in the game applies the same match-making logic we’ve had for the past few months in Hunt-a-thons to regular encounters in the wild. This new feature, which Niantic is calling ‘Dimensional Link’, basically means that a few of the monsters on your map will be ‘trapped between worlds’. When you select them, you’ll be taken to a quick lobby (similar to the ones you’ll find in Hunt-a-thons), and from here it’ll automatically populate with other players that are waiting to slay the same monster you are.
It might seem a little useless, this, but when you think about the fact you get more rewards when you hunt in a group, and certain monsters at your level may be harder to kill on your own, it makes sense. There are also quests that require you to hunt in groups from time to time, and this new feature will make it a lot easier to complete these in a timely manner (and will hopefully mean you won’t have to buy tickets to speed the process up…).
Niantic reckons there are over 15 million people playing the game at the moment, so you should never struggle to find someone in the lobby with you. I play about three or four Hunt-a-thons a day, and usually the lobby is filled within seconds in those encounters. I imagine the same will be true here.
“With more than 15 million downloads globally, we know our community is enjoying the chance to hunt monsters on the go, and we’re excited for those players to invite their friends to hunt together with players from all around the world, whether they’re in San Francisco, New York, London, Berlin, Seoul or Tokyo,” said Archit Bhargava, senior director of product marketing at Niantic, in a pre-brief about the update. “There’s never been a better time to jump into Monster Hunter Now, whether you’re a long time Monster Hunter franchise fan or brand new to the series.”
Yes, that’s a pretty PR-forward statement, but it’s true: if you’re new to the game, or even just considering getting involved thanks to the hype that’s building around Monster Hunter Wilds, the ability to link up with players around the world is certainly going to make those first few hours a bit easier for new players.
I've probably logged well over 500 hours in Monster Hunter Now, by this point, and I’m still not bored of it. Download it, play it, and make the wait for Wilds that much easier – you won’t regret it.
Monster Hunter Now's Dimensional Link update is Friday, June 26. You can download the game on iOS or Android.