Monster Hunter 5 PS4 PlayStation 4 1

Who doesn’t love a 4chan rumour? Despite the generally dreadful track record of the infamous message board, legit leaks do sometimes crop up on the site, so you can’t always disregard them outright. And this chatter about Monster Hunter 5 has been heating up of late, so we’re going to drop a quick piece on it all the same.

So what’s the ‘TL;DR’ summary of events? A poster who correctly revealed that Monster Hunter XX would be announced for the Switch – didn’t take a genius that one, did it? – claims that Sony has secured some form of exclusivity of Monster Hunter 5, though this won’t preclude Portable branded entries from appearing on Nintendo’s machine.

The rumour is that the fifth entry in the famous animal slaughtering series will be quite unlike previous instalments, incorporating a large open world and focusing on the Western market. Apparently the game will be a little more accessible than its predecessors, removing timers and making the action much easier to understand.

The insinuation is that a Monster Hunter 5 Portable will further the brand’s established format on the Nintendo Switch, while the PS4 title will target the tastes of Europe and North America. To be fair, Capcom has suggested that it wants the series to do better in the West, but whether this is the right way to go about it remains to be seen.

And that’s if the rumour is real to begin with. There are some inconsistencies in the original post that lead us to believe it’s fan fiction; the rumour monger claims that Sony paid through the nose to get an exclusive Monster Hunter title in order to improve its position in Japan, but then almost immediately goes on to talk about the Western focus.

While the PlayStation maker has not given up on its home nation by any stretch, its priorities lie elsewhere, so we’re not entirely convinced it would be willing to stump up for a game specifically designed to improve its standing in Japan – especially when that game also sounds like it’s been built with other territories in mind.

So could Monster Hunter come to the PS4? Well, as we’ve written many times, Capcom’s finally going to have to upgrade those 3DS assets, so unless Nintendo has a big money hat in place once again, we could see the series finally coming to PS4 at some point – as well as PC and potentially Xbox. But is this specific rumour accurate? Our money’s on no for now.

[source neogaf.com]