As the opening reveal of this year’s Gamescom Opening Night Live, HoYoverse brought its first official look at Nodusfall—a change of pace for the gacha game behemoth that looks a little bit Elden Ring, a lot bit Monster Hunter, and a whole pile of proper nouns added for good measure.
While I like to think it takes more to catch my attention than forcefully mashing together two things I think are neat, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted by the idea. If there’s one thing Monster Hunter monsters have been missing, it’s FromSoft-style primordial depression.
From the looks of things, there’s more than enough metaphysical malaise to go around in Nodusfall. The laws of divinity have apparently frayed, plunging creation into a state of cosmic disarray. There are 10 suns now. Ideally, there’s only supposed to be one of those. Not great!
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Luckily for those of us who like to be given an excuse to try to fight a lizard 30 times our size, all that profound devastation seems to have produced a wide selection of giant, charismatic creatures to swordfight alongside your friends. In the reveal trailer embedded above, I saw giant bears, some sort of giant pack foxes, a horned, winged manticore, and a dragon or two (giant). I don’t yet know how Nodusfall’s progression works, but if I’m not allowed to harvest all their individual pieces and turn them into pants, I’m going to feel personally betrayed.
While the glimpses of combat shown in the footage looks like it hews pretty closely to the pace and rhythm of Monster Hunter, Nodusfall does seem to be dropping a few original elements into the mix. At one point, one of the player characters uses some sort of transformation ability to become a giant, armored knight in the middle of a hunt. And later, two players perform an elaborate, paired execution animation.
What remains to be seen is what sort of monetization scheme Nodusfall will be wrapped in—something that HoYoverse’s history doesn’t exactly inspire confidence about. If I have to do gacha pulls for a gunlance, I’m going to have a hard time.
Nodusfall doesn’t have much of an online presence yet, so it’ll likely be a while before we can expect a release date.
