Yuya Tokuda, director of the upcoming slay-a-thon Monster Hunter Wilds, is very proud of the terrifying Oilwell Basin and the critters within it. The basin itself is styled as a 'what if we made the deep ocean on land and then set it all on fire' zone. For context, it's home to that horrible "affront to god" fans were yelping about last year.
It's also home to—spoilers, obviously—the apex creature Nu Udra, which is sort of what you'd get if you made a squid on land and then set it all on fire. In an interview and reveal with IGN, the top beastie of the Oilwell Basin is revealed to be an enormous squidlike monstrosity dubbed The Black Flame.
Judging by the video, its favourite activities appear to be belching with the screams of the damned, setting itself on fire, trying to flatten you with its many tentacles, and squirming. It really is an impressively awful thing to look at—with a set of eyes reminiscent of deep-sea slugs. It's also, according to Tokuda, a landmark technical achievement for the team.
"Monsters with tentacles like that pose a lot of technical challenges," Tokuda explains, "Like controlling it with respect to the terrain and its target. When we began development on Wilds, the technical department's tests went incredibly well, and so we felt like we could really make it happen this time."
Tokuda also remarks on an animator proudly showing off the way Nu Udra squirms into its horrid little hole with its cephalopod body, sort of like a kid showing off a drawing to their parents:
"When we first implemented the movement of it going inside a hole, an animator told me, 'When you weaken it and it starts heading back to its nest, please wait here for a moment!' … They wanted me to see it going into its little hole, and I still remember replying, 'Oh, that really is amazing!' The animator looked so satisfied as well."
"When we saw the tests, we also thought to make it the apex predator of the Oilwell Basin," Tokuda adds. For him, Nu Udra isn't just a terrible slippery boy, it's also the kind of technical achievement he's wanted to nail for a while: "While there are countless proposals that I've had rejected due to technical reasons, it feels like I'm finally getting to attempt one of those this time around."
Generally I wouldn't assume tone of voice through text, but it's hard not to get a sense of infectious glee and pride as Tokuda talks about this thing. "It might not be easy to get the chance to see it, but the way it squirms around while wrapped around a pipe is so well made too … I do hope you check it out. Only games are able to depict things like that in real-time instead of as some premade scene. I'm incredibly proud of it as a crystallization of the staff's efforts." He also adds that "you can cut off so many tentacles".
As for how hunters are to try and dodge this hell octopus? Focus on the eyes, not the lovecraftian tendrils. "We've made it so that it has sensory organs at the tips of its tentacles that use light to indicate when and who it's going to attack."
All in all, the Oilwell Basin doesn't sound, uh, great from a tourism perspective—but I'm excited to get stuck in the muck, grabbed, and set on fire. As hard as I'm being on this affront to nature, it does look fun as heck to fight, and that's what it's all about—if I get any time to do so, mind. The early half of 2025 is looking stacked with some killer games already, and my thumbs are gonna be real busy.
