Latest Monster Hunter: World trailer shows how you customise your feline companions

In Monster Hunter: World you'll be slaying nasties alongside a cute companion called a Palico. They're essentially feline assistants that will help you out during battles and quests, and given that they're constantly at your side you'll probably want to make them your own. Thankfully, a new trailer suggests that the customisation options for your Palicos will be pretty robust.

You can choose your Palico's fur pattern, customise colours on different parts of their body (you can have one pink ear and one blue one, for example), change their eyes and even fold their ears over. You can also tweak their tails, clothing and default armour. It's essentially everything you'd usually get in a main character customisation screen, and I can see people taking a lot of time getting the exact look that they want.

The trailer also hints at some of the things the Palicos will be doing for you: everything from cook to ride into battle on the back of a dinosaur. There's clips of different Palicos holding very different weapons, so presumably you can kit them out with whatever gear you want. There's even one with a lute on their back. A Palico bard whose musics spurs you on, maybe?

The game is set to come out on PC early- to mid-2018. If you're interested, click here for Austin's thoughts on what it should look like when it arrives.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.