Monster Hunter Wilds: The retention loop
Human beings have never acted without a purpose. Even for the most basic actions such as eating, sleeping and reproducing, we feel a sense of pleasure. The search for this pleasurable sensation leads to repetition of the action in question. This biological mechanism has aroused the interest of researchers, who have identified a reward circuit. This chemical broth, which invades our brain, has become a goal to be achieved in many areas of our world, which revolves around money. Video games are no exception. I’d like to take a look at why we get hooked on certain games and not others. Among these projects affectionately known as ‘drugs’, I’ve chosen Monster Hunter Wilds (MHW) as my base. Not being an assiduous fan of the licence, after an unsuccessful attempt to get into the World opus, it was the 2025 opus that made me devour the hours without being able to count them. Aside from the fun gameplay and revised accessibility, there were other things that kept me holding the controller as my backlog grew by the minute.
Reward and addiction
Before we get into MHW’s illustration, let’s go back to the famous reward circuit that has been mentioned everywhere for a long time. It’s not unique to humans, but is found in all mammals. As I said in the introduction, the initial purpose of this circuit was to ensure actions fundamental to survival. Later, it was extended to much more trivial things. There are three phases in its operation: the trigger, pleasure and satisfaction. The trigger is a stimulus that initiates action, such as hunger, which makes us want to eat when blood glucose levels fall. Pleasure is the direct reward for the action: eating gives pleasure. Satisfaction closes this circuit and rewards the response to the need, the satisfaction of having eaten well. The system then goes on standby until the next stimulus. We are therefore dealing with a complex cascade at the heart of our mental activity. It involves nerve connections between the tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens, which are supplied by the neurotransmitter dopamine. This is also where most highly addictive drugs act. The discovery was made in 1950 by Old and Milner, when electrodes were implanted in the hypothalamus, the centre of vigilance, in rats. The aim was to stimulate the area in specific parts of the cage to make the guinea pigs, on their guard, no longer want to go there. It was an almost perfect success, as only one specimen did not behave as expected; on the contrary, it seemed to seek out the electrical impulse. After dissecting the specimen, it turned out that the electrode had not been correctly implanted, as it was connected to the septum. This result led to a second experiment in which, this time, all the electrodes were located in this famous septum. The difference was that it was no longer the researcher who chose to administer the electrical stimulation, but the rat using a foot pedal. The conclusion is as follows: the less stimulation the rat receives, the more it presses the trigger. This is how the pleasure centre was identified.
Of course, our joysticks and keyboards are not connected to electrodes, at least not for the moment. So designers have to find other ways of reaching those wonderful little grey cells. But that’s not the whole story. What we’re interested in here is not pleasure, but retention. This is much more complex than a simple dopamine shot, and requires perfect mastery of the three stages mentioned above (trigger, pleasure and satisfaction) to create a cycle that can be repeated, but above all that the player will want to repeat for as long as possible, ideally indefinitely. Adding this notion brings us closer to the definition of addiction, so let’s take another look at this alarming video game addiction.
First of all, what is addiction from a medical point of view? The reference in this area is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5), which I have already mentioned in my article “Video games beyond entertainment“. The latest version of this manual dates from 2013 and includes the notion of gaming in the broadest sense. The diagnosis is based on eleven criteria:
- Compelling and irrepressible need to use the substance or to gamble
- Loss of control over the amount and amount of time spent taking substances or gambling
- A lot of time spent looking for substances or gambling
- Increased tolerance to the addictive product
- Presence of withdrawal syndrome
- Inability to fulfil important obligations
- Use even when there is a physical risk
- Personal or social problems
- Persistent desire or efforts to reduce doses or activity
- Reduced activity in favour of consumption or gambling
- Continued consumption despite physical or psychological damage
These criteria can be used to characterise the degree of severity of the addiction:
- Presence of 2 to 3 criteria: weak addiction
- Presence of 4 to 5 criteria: moderate addiction
- Presence of 6 or more criteria: severe addiction
If the retention tools are effective, it’s easy to meet the criteria for a weak addiction. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), video games can present a risk of behavioural dependence that can be distinguished from addiction to a substance, although this remains extremely rare. Based on 27 studies carried out between 1998 and 2016 in 24 countries, the prevalence is 4.7%, meaning that out of every 100 cases studied, only around 5 were truly problematic. Knowing that the volunteers in these studies are recruited according to precise criteria, extended to the population of gamers, the figure must fall. If we replace video games with alcohol, the prevalence rises to 7% for people aged 15 and over. Even if we have to be vigilant about our own consumption of video games and that of our loved ones, misuse is often the result of an upstream problem that needs to be dealt with by professionals. That said, let’s get back to what we’re interested in: the tools MHW has put together to keep you playing for hours on end.ésultante d’un problème en amont qui doit être pris en charge par des professionnels. Ceci dit, revenons à ce qui nous intéresse, les outils mis en page par MHW pour vous faire jouer des heures durant.
First hour experience
The first hour of gameplay is an important part of any production. At a time when some 68% of gamers never see the credits, it’s vital to satisfy them as quickly as possible. Players don’t hesitate to rate the game or share their feelings within the first few hours. That’s why the first hour is often packed full of gameplay and storytelling that will blow your mind. The primary aim is to push the player to go as far as possible in the experience, to keep the player, to generate retention.
Let’s retrace the beginning of the Monster Hunter Wilds adventure. We start with a cinematic that sets up the story, which centres on the discovery of a territory that is thought to be uninhabitable. An expedition finds a young boy, Nata, who claims to come from a hidden village. Needless to say, the guild is planning an expedition to find out more. Our hunter finds himself or herself on a boat flying off into forbidden lands. In the distance, a strange creature appears, a seikret, ridden by a young girl, pursued by monsters. Without missing a beat, we jump on the second seikret, which was following the first, with the mission of saving the young girl and repelling Balahara’s horde. What follows is a totally scripted gameplay phase, with monsters popping up everywhere, destructible set pieces and Hollywood-style camera shots, before ending up in the middle of the desert, far from any danger. We pitch our first tent on the edge of a charming oasis, where we learn that the survivor’s brother is also in danger at the mercy of a giant frog. Before setting off, Alma, your assistant, gives you the chance to choose a weapon from the 14 available, with the option to try and change if you feel like it. Add your palicot, a feline creature who helps you in combat, and the whole little group sets off on its first hunt, targeting the chatacabra. The catacabra is in a cave, in a new environment, where it threatens its big brother. This first fight is designed to present few difficulties. The monster is slow, announcing its attacks in advance, and the beanbag grabs your attention. In short, the fight is pleasant, dynamic and rewarding. Everyone is saved, happy and on their way back to the newly established camp. What an experience, my friends!
That’s what the first hour experience is all about, offering as much as possible to keep the player wanting more. The big improvement in this Monster Hunter opus is the staging, with generous cinematics. If we set this first hour alongside the retention, the aim is to create a strong sense of satisfaction so that the player seeks to recapture this sensation. Human beings instinctively want to recapture that emotion. The player will therefore progress through the game in search of this satisfaction. To a much greater degree, this is also the first stage of addiction, having an initial intense contact that you will seek to recapture afterwards. Of course, video games don’t offer this first shot, but a desire to restart a loop, because the previous one was satisfying. So the first step has been taken, and all that’s left is to bring out the heavy artillery.
The feeling of becoming stronger
Once the player has been hooked, the developers need to offer a controlled progression curve so that the player has the feeling of constantly advancing without coming up against a wall of difficulty. Boredom and frustration have to be tackled, as they are the brakes on satisfaction. The first thing to note is that difficulty cannot be modified in MHW. This makes it all the more important for the progression to be well thought out and adapted to as many people as possible. Fans of the series often complain that the game is too easy. My response is that the content on offer at the moment is just the beginning of the adventure, and that future updates will make the game denser and add more content. This is confirmed by the first major update on four April and the arrival of the Zoh Shia Guardian. But that’s not what I want to talk about here. We’ve seen that the first monster you encounter doesn’t really present much of a challenge. The second, the quematrice, a mixture of fowl and reptile associated with the element of fire, doesn’t necessarily increase the difficulty, but it does bring new elements. Area damage is formalised as a tail movement to spread fire in an arc. Repeated blows are introduced by a succession of rapid beak blows. These should normally be dodged, but don’t pose any real risk given the limited damage they do. Fire zones are announced by the monster, making them easy to avoid. The Quematrice is also the first monster with a severable part, the tail. It is imposing, almost more so than the monster itself, and a source of the most damage. The player will therefore tend to hit it until it detaches. So we have a giant chicken with a new type of attack and a new mechanic, again with the idea of making it easier for the player to learn. This combination of elements will give the game a much more powerful feel than our frog, which looks pretty bland compared to this fight. The curve will climb in this way throughout the novice phase of the game. You’ll have to deal with several monsters, creatures that heal their wounds, elites and legends of the series, right up to the final boss, who takes everything you’ve seen so far and validates it before moving on to the expert phase. I’m not going to go over the progression of this second arc again, because it’s basically the same old, same old, only harder. Throughout this progression, the game gives you everything you need to prepare for what’s to come. Weapons, armour, potions, food and even allies. We’ll come back to the stuff in another paragraph, but I’d like to dwell on the multiplayer game. Very quickly into the adventure, we unlock the distress rockets, more a call for co-op than a real call for help. At any time, you can open up your hunt to three other people, bots or players, at the touch of a button. Either because you like playing with others, friends or strangers, or because the challenge seems too tough, either way the option is very accessible. That’s worth noting, because the title’s interface is far from easy to get to grips with, which is something the studio wanted to emphasise. There’s also the option of saving your hunts so you can do them again on your own or with someone else. Another special feature of Monster Hunter is that you have to be knocked out three times to fail the quest. The first two lead to a return to the nearest camp, where you can be treated, stocked up on consumables and even eat a meal to replenish your buffs before returning to the monster, which is waiting for you with its life bar still intact. You can also return to the camp at any time to replenish your supplies. The only constraint is the time limit, which is very generous – almost an hour – leaving you free to manage your battle as you wish. There are a few exceptions, such as arena battles, but these are restricted to specific monsters. All of which is to say that the difficulty is carefully thought out and can be modulated to a certain extent, in an attempt to strike the famous balance between satisfaction and frustration. It’s a tightrope act, with every misstep leading many players to abandon the adventure, and surely one of the most sensitive aspects of the game’s retention mechanics. That’s why Capcom is listening closely to players’ feedback on the difficulty and the feeling of progression, in order to make appropriate corrections, as we saw with this first update in April. Watch this space, because according to the roadmap, players will have plenty to sink their teeth into over the coming months and years.
How to romanticize the hunt
Anyone who’s stumbled across an episode of ‘Hunting and Fishing’ in the middle of the night knows how far from exciting it is to recount the hunt. The stakes are pretty low if you take away the idea of killing a big beast to make a coat out of it. Yet narrative plays a major role in retention, it’s the very principle of cinema and literature. Video games are no exception to the rule. Even if it’s not necessarily present (see roguelikes), the story is an important tool that’s hard to ignore. Its main purpose is to set a goal, to create attachment to the characters and to the universe, giving the impression of acting for something great. Save the princess/world/universe (delete as appropriate) great pixel hero, without you we’re lost. Rare are the games that offer us a quality narrative, all the more so when they’re AAA productions. The simple outline of the ultimate denouement strewn with pitfalls is often only there to create a pseudo-tension that we want to know the outcome. All this is wrapped up in lore, which can be translated as folklore, to make the single myth unique. But we can’t help it, the story has to have an ending, so if it’s well constructed, even if it’s a bit of a whitewash, it always pushes us to go a little further to find out what happens next. Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, is a master of this style. At the end of each page of the novel, you want to go on to the next. MHW is no exception to the rule, but it is something of a special case in the licence. The series is not renowned for its narrative quality or the richness of its world. There’s a hunter’s guild with more or less emblematic representatives, rules about not killing at the drop of a hat (I’m talking about narrative, not game design) and a world that is given a new region with each opus, but we’re light years away from a gripping story. Wilds is trying something. As we saw when we talked about the first hour, the game opens with a cinematic introducing the forbidden lands and the existence of an unknown people via one of its members, Nata, found in the middle of the desert. Each new threat that needs to be repelled or eliminated is introduced narratively, as are mechanics such as capture and jewels. The main quest is enriched with secondary content such as improving the palicot or unlocking new hooks. But the basic story is still to learn more about the Watchers, Nata’s people, and the reason why they are forced to hide underground. The clues are given in dribs and drabs, not that the suspense is unbearable, but they’re more like pauses to breathe between hunts or moments of farming before the endgame. When you move on to the expert phase, the narrative dwindles to a bare minimum to give a little context to each hunt, but also to give the player a little more freedom. The player is in control of all the game’s mechanics, begins to master his weapon and the patterns of his targets, and is autonomous. The story gradually gives way to exploration and challenge, with the nets removed and the fights really carried out, sometimes requiring you to adapt your equipment to feel more at ease.
Being the best hunter
Now we come to an important aspect of Monster Hunter: the stuff or equipment. The real hunt isn’t for monsters, but rather for the most effective or best-looking armour. There are no real character levels or upgradable abilities in this title. All the progression lies in the equipment you own. You can’t just loot this stuff, you have to make it and have it forged. That’s where the game really comes into its own. Obviously, the components needed for this crafting are not obtained after a single hunt. Whether in terms of numbers or rarity, you’ll have to kill or capture the creature whose equipment you want several times over. As the only way to increase damage and resistance, armour and weapons are not enough to complete the entire game. So you’ll have to go through the collection stage several times at novice rank, expert rank and, if the formula doesn’t change for this opus, master rank. You soon realise that the optimisation doesn’t stop there. The game adds jewels and Artian weapons, which are also subject to loot from high-level monsters, to which we must add the randomness of stats. Indeed, while a monster guarantees you a number of jewels and Artian components, the stats are only revealed once the hunt is successful. Knowing that there are over a hundred gems and that each Artian weapon requires three components, farming becomes dizzying if you want optimised equipment. In the endgame, the ultimate goal is not to kill the most dangerous monster, but to do it as quickly as possible in its supreme alpha gold crown version (white sauce supplement). Stats and high damage aren’t everything. I quickly discovered that customising the appearance of pieces of armour is no small part of this title, which has a huge community. There are the Fashion Hunters, a large number of players who compete with each other to have the most stylish or the most unlikely appearance. Of course, in order to use the skin for a particular piece of equipment, you need to own it, and for that you have to… farm! Curiosity is another factor, because while the game doesn’t reveal all the equipment available from the outset, it does intrigue us by revealing, in the form of question marks, future items that will become available when monsters or materials are discovered. In this way, it encourages us to go a little further to see if the next unlock is an improvement on our build or not. I’m not going to go into detail about farming for potions, traps and buffs, but players know what they’re doing. The final point that will make you the best hunter is your title. On your profile, you can give yourself a title made up of three words. The lexicon grows as you progress through the main story and the side content. To get the ‘rarest’ words, you have to hunt monsters several times, dozens of times. All of which is to say that the game puts in place a whole host of elements to ensure that players always have a goal to aim for, whether it’s the most damage, the best-looking outfit or the most original title. Everyone is sure to find something to motivate them to rack up the hours of gameplay if the primers, which we mentioned earlier, have achieved their objective. If you take a look at howlongtobeat.com, the bible of game longevity, you’ll quickly realise that many players who wanted to do 100% of Monster Hunter Wilds, even though all the content isn’t there, have exceeded one hundred or even two hundred hours of hunting. All to achieve the ultimate satisfaction.
MH and no other
The strength of MHW lies in all its predecessors. The first episode was released on Playstation 2 in 2004. In twenty-one years, no fewer than twenty-seven MH games have been released, across all platforms. And the development teams have made the most of the licence to turn it into something unique. You recognise the game at first glance. The artistic direction, the design in the broadest sense and the Monster Hunter atmosphere are the main selling point. It gets better with each new version. While not everything about this iteration is perfect – the menus are laborious – there’s no denying that it’s a clear improvement on Rise and World, making the game more accessible to neophytes and offering a variation in gameplay with the focus mode. In this way, the game renews the interest of older players, pushing the concept of retention across several games. In addition, there are some never-before-seen monsters, as well as some that have left their mark on previous generations. Let’s face it, these are not easy games to get to grips with, especially when it comes to really mastering a weapon, because not everything is explained – it’s a skill that’s passed on from player to player. You only have to look at the profusion of tutorials available online from Wilds’ open beta. There’s a real community around the licence, and a certain amount of mutual support too. Over and above the in-game multiplayer, there’s a real desire on the part of players to get their friends involved in the adventure. Why this attachment to the licence? Quite simply because nobody does MH better than MH. Some have tried but failed. The recipe is mastered from start to finish, with recurring characters, beans, weapons, monsters and so on. You can smell Monster Hunter a mile away. That’s why each release is eagerly awaited, and why the number of players keeps growing. The pleasure derived from the licence is unique. The need to discover each new iteration is strong. The satisfaction of rediscovering the power achieved in the past is without comparison. Need, pleasure, satisfaction, does it speak to you?
There’s good retention and …
Everything we’ve seen is part of a system of interlocking loops. The combo loop is part of an injury loop, a hunting loop, a crafting loop and a hunter rank loop. The concept of the gameplay loop is simple and takes us back to the reward circuit. There we find the trigger, the pleasure and the satisfaction. If we take the combo, the combat triggers the pleasure of successful execution, and the player is satisfied by the damage caused. This loop is repeated over and over again during a fight, with the desire for the numbers displayed, the damage, to get bigger and bigger, which will initiate all the cascading loops to gain the mastery and equipment needed to inflate the numbers. This quest for ever greater satisfaction is the basis of addiction. Of course, it’s not a pathological addiction, and in the case of MH, it’s not malicious and, above all, doesn’t require the investment of real money. There are, however, daily rewards and time-limited events that may be the beginnings of an addiction. But in other games, often mobile games, the microtransactions of free-to-play games can lead to problematic behaviour. The multiplication of game time in MMORPGs or the principle of collecting in gatcha games leads to excessive consumption that needs to be monitored among those most likely to get caught up. We’re a long way from the video game that perverts our children, but we mustn’t forget that in many studios, especially if they’re big, profits take precedence over benevolence. Retention is an important design feature in the medium that interests us, but like many tools, the danger depends on who is using it. Many play with limits. If we restrict ourselves to MHW, the loops and therefore the retention remain rather healthy, a ‘good drug’ that allows players to take pleasure without any harmful counterpart. And it does it well. On this opus, the controllers are pushed to the limit to deliver an experience that lives up to expectations and that will be addictive for newcomers like me.
Conclusion
To sum up, there are many methods – I haven’t mentioned them all – to encourage you to spend more and more time playing. I’d advise you to read up on in-game feedback, which is also very evocative. Rewards, however small, are often necessary to make the experience a pleasant one. From the small cosy game where the pleasure lies in creating a safe place to the big production like Monster Hunter Wilds, game designers put in place retention tools to make a tempting proposition. The concepts of trigger, pleasure and satisfaction can also be a formidable weapon for manipulating the player into spending more time or money on the game. In a way, the right positioning depends on the ethics of the studio/publisher. Above all, it’s up to us, the gamers, to be careful not to fall into these traps laid out by unscrupulous people. Battle passes (Fortnite) and rewards for successive connections (Gamepass) are the other side of the retention coin, which encourages excessive consumption. It is possible to create a virtuous circle that rewards games that do things properly, thereby encouraging future productions in this direction. Consumers have much more power than they think.
sources :
La Présentation – le circuit de la recompense (ou système de récompense)
https://www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/fr
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