Wild Hearts release time: When you can start the EA Play First trial

Wild Hearts combat — (Image credit: Koei Tecmo)

Wild Hearts is EA & Koei Tecmo's take on Monster Hunter: smash giant mythological beasts with giant swords, then use their body parts to make even better swords to smash their friends with. Nature's beautiful, isn't it?

Wild Hearts releases today, February 13—but with a catch. Only EA Play subscribers get early access, while everyone else has to wait until February 13 for the full release. And that full release will vary by timezone and platform, too. It's a bit complicated, so here's what you need to know to jump into Wild Hearts as soon as possible.

Wild Hearts release times

Wild Hearts releases on February 13 for EA Play subscribers beginning at 7 am PT (15:00 UTC). It'll be available at that time on both PC and consoles.

The full game won't be accessible, though. The February 13 release is just the EA Play First trial, which is available if you pay $5 per month (or $30 a year) for an EA Play subscription, or if you're a Game Pass Ultimate member. The Play First trial lets you play the opening bits of Wild Hearts, leading to your arrival at the game's hub city Minato. You could spend several hours exploring the opening zone, but the missions that lead you to Minato will only take an hour or two to complete.

Here's the EA Play First Trial release time in a few more timezones:

New York: 10 am ET
London: 3 pm GMT
Paris: 4 pm CET

Wild Hearts' full release is February 16 at 7 am PT on PC. That's the exact same time as the trial version listed above, just three days later.

However, the console version of Wild Hearts has a separate launch time—it'll go live at midnight in each timezone on February 17th. So when midnight arrives in your timezone, you'll be able to hop in. That means lucky players in Australia will have a significant headstart on some other timezones. Try not to hold it against them when you party up for a hunt.

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).