Fashion hunters rejoice as Monster Hunter Wilds ditches gendered armor: Capcom confirms 'all characters can wear any gear'

(Image credit: Capcom)

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.

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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).