Monster Hunter: World is adding an incredibly exciting dynamic difficulty system

Here's a fantastic bit of news I missed during E3: Monster Hunter: World is getting a dynamic difficulty system, fixing a lonstanding series issue for multiplayer hunts.

In Monster Hunter games, there's typically only two sets of monster difficulty, one for singleplayer and one for multiplayer. Tackle a hunt with a party, and the monster will have approximately double the health they do for a solo fight. But it doesn't matter if you're in a party of two, three, or four: the health doesn't change. This makes two-player hunts a real slog compared to full party hunts, and if you start a hunt with a group and they disconnect, you're stuck fighting a monster solo that has twice as much HP as it should. That's a real drag.

No more. As IGN points out, during an E3 livestream Capcom said that World is getting a new dynamic difficulty system, and it's not just for Iceborne players. It's coming to the base game. There's now an in-between setting for two-player hunts, where monsters have less health than they would for three- and four-player groups.

The best part is that if you drop back to solo play, the monster's health will now scale with you back to singleplayer levels. That should earn a sigh of relief from anyone who's run into a random server disconnect or had a player bail from a hunt after dying once.

There's no word on when this mechanic will make its way to the PC version, but it's available in the current Iceborne beta on PS4. At the very latest, we should at least get it with the PC release of Iceborne this winter.

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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).