The Monster Hunter Wilds beta is live with an early glimpse of the new camping, wound and weather systems

Stroll on down to Uncle Capcom's garage, girls and boys, because it's time to meddle with a cat's voicebox, ride a combat peacock and meticulously injure a vast, blubbery teddybear. By which I mean, the Monster Hunter Wilds beta is now live on Steam through to 4th November at 2.59am GMT. That's 2.59am sharp. If you're hurrying along at 3am on Monday absolutely desperate to polish the aesthetics of a small enslaved catperson, you can sod off and play Dragon Age: The Veilguard instead.

To celebrate, Capcom have published an introductory guide on Steam that goes into such detail it renders the playing of the open beta absolutely needless, ho ho, I kid, Capcom, please put the greatsword down. To recap, the open beta lets you create a character and Palico assistant. It gives you access to a Story Trial, in which you'll get to experiment with 14 different weapons and visit destruction upon a helpless trainer's dummy, together with a Doshaguma Hunt, which takes you out onto the Windward Plains in search of relatively resistant furry mammals to slaughter. While you're out there, you might go Wild with one of the following new Wilds features:

- Focus Mode! This is a new magic vision ability that lets you see monster wounds. These don't look like wounds, however. They look like glowing weak points, because this is a Capcom game. Imagine if Mortal Kombat did it this way.

- Ride your Seikret! This is the aforesaid combat peacock. Not to mix my analogies/metaphors, but it's also a packmule with a pouch for supply items and the opportunity to switch between two loadouts while mounted. What's more, you can sharpen weapons while riding your battlebird, and it even has an auto-drive feature. They could have saved themselves some animation budget and just swapped it for a Toyota Yaris.

- Camping! You can now have your Palico acquaintance pitch a tent for you to bask inside, cooking or changing your gear or just reclining like a prince. Be warned however that Monsters may come up and sit on it. A herd of sheep did this to me once in darkest North Yorkshire. Ah, what I wouldn't have given for a Toyoto Yaris at the time.

- Slay the Rey Dau! There are a bunch of monsters in the beta. The rarest of them all is a dragon that lives in a thunderstorm. I saw an Alpha Doshaguma battle one of these back at Summer Game Fest. It did not go well for the Alpha Doshaguma. It turns out that in Mother Nature's great game of roshambo, lightning lizards > furry fartboys.

- Witness the changing weather! There are several seasons in store, all of which appear to have been named by mildly religious poets. Inclemency is "an ecology-altering event that sweeps in a raging storm" - beware lightning bolts, whether ye be hunterman or monste. Fallow is "a period of scarcity, with hungry predators roaming the land for food", while Plenty is a time of abundant map resources and smaller fauna. I see no option for Wearitude, the British season that somehow combines the heat of summer with the chilliness of winter, and is abundant in wasps that refuse to die or hibernate or whatever it is they do when they're not invading my sandwiches.

- Possibly turn off the spiders! I'm not sure if the Wilds beta includes arachnids, but in the full version of the game, you can transform them into slimes, though they will still move like spiders, which is possibly worse.

Speaking of the full version of Monster Hunter Wilds, it's out on 28th February 2025, and your character and Palico from the beta will carry over. So there's no reason not to overcommit. I won't be playing, unfortunately, because my brother is in town and we'll be busy hunting the greatest prey of all: an affordable non-Dominos pizza in London. Give my regards to the Doshaguma.