On your very first hunt in Monster Hunter Wilds, you’ll learn how to use SOS Flares to call in reinforcements. As the saying goes, many hands make light work, and having some help on the battlefield can speed up a fight or, at the very least, give you some breathing room when you need to get away from the monster to heal up or learn its strategy. Monster Hunter is fun to play solo, but it’s really meant to be played with other people.
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Monster Hunter Wilds Review: Don’t Think, Just Hunt
Monster Hunter Wilds is a more approachable, if slightly more mindless Monster Hunter.
If you’ve played other games in the series, you know the SOS system is a bit of a trap. It’s one thing to squad up with your homies and farm some tempered elder dragons together, but shooting a flare into the digital void asking anyone and everyone for help tends to end up being more trouble than it’s worth. Sometimes you get a god gamer rushing to your side for a quick carry, but more often than not, you end up summoning a dunce who’s going to cart three times in the first five minutes and get both of you kicked back to base camp, sans prizes.
Whether they’re amateur hunters or just trolls trying to ruin your good time, the fact of the matter is that randos on the internet are not a particularly reliable demographic. For this reason I never use SOS flares. I hunt with friends I trust, or I hunt alone.
AI Really Is Taking All Of The Good Jobs
Capcom has introduced an interesting solution to this problem in Monster Hunter Wilds, and it’s something that fans have been requesting for a long time. For the first time ever, you can use the SOS Flare to call for NPC backup. Support Hunters, as they’re called, are bots who can fight by your side just like real-life players – and in some ways, they’re even better.
The biggest benefit of Support Hunters is that they cannot cart and cause you to fail a mission. While a real-life player can join your hunt, instantly die, and ruin the entire hunt, Support Hunters know how to take care of themselves. They’ll use their own items, disengage when they have to, and generally only do things that help you. It’s nice to call in reinforcements when you don’t have to babysit them, and they usually make fights more fun.
Cart, in Monster Hunter parlance, means to essentially lose a life while fighting a monster.
You don’t have to be solo to call in Support Hunters either. Monster Hunter games have a weird quirk when it comes to scaling. Monster difficulty scales for two-player and four-player parties, but even when you only have three hunters, you’ll be hunting on the four-player difficulty. With Support Hunters, you can fill in that fourth slot and get some extra power without the additional risk that would normally come from inviting in a rando.
At first, it’s going to feel like Support Hunters are totally broken. If you do a few of the early game hunts solo, then do a couple with a full party of bots, it’s easy to see how much faster and smoother hunts are with Support Hunters. Wilds is already a pretty streamlined game compared to past Monster Hunters, and playing with bots can almost make it feel like you’re not really even playing the game at all.
How To Hunt Monsters Without Lifting A Finger
During the review period we theorized that you could let Support Hunters do an entire hunt for you without ever having to unsheath your sword, and unfortunately, this isn’t really the case. Well, it is mostly the case, but there are a few rules you have to keep in mind.
The Support Hunters will not engage a monster until you do. You can’t just sit back and wait for them to do all the dirty work, because they will never do it. As long as you engage the monster first though, they’ll jump to it.
After a while, they’ll stop. If you’re standing on the sidelines watching the fight, the bots will eventually realize what’s going on and disengage. When that happens you’ll have to get back into the fight, even if that just means pinging the monster with a shot of slinger ammo. Eventually the bots will disengage again, and you’ll have to inspire them to keep going with one more attack of your own.
The bots also will not deliver a killing blow. They’ll get the monster all the way down to a single hit point, but they will not finish it off. At that point, you can do pretty much whatever you want to finish the monster off. I suspect this technique will be used to create some viral last hits. At least, that’s what I’m hoping for.
So the Support Hunters won’t do the entire hunt for you, but they will do about 99 percent of it. Keep in mind this technique probably won’t save you a lot of time. Our video production manager Sam Hallahan ran a few test hunts to see how long it takes to be a freeloader in a fight. He (meaning the bots) took down a Chatacabra in 13 minutes and a duo of Hirabami in 16. You could get similar times on your own, and likely much faster with some strong equipment and know-how.
But if for some reason you need to multitask, this is an option. If you find yourself, say, writing articles for TheGamer while trying to grind Hunter Ranks, you could conceivably AFK some hunts in the background. I wouldn’t encourage it, but you could definitely do it.
- Released
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February 28, 2025
- ESRB
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T For Teen // Violence, Blood, Crude Humor