Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak brings new monster variants, Follower Quests, and a new Pro Controller

The latest infodump for Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak just aired on the official Monster Hunter Twitch channel, and brought with it a veritable host of information that will be sure to please Monster Hunter Rise players.

New Monsters, Monster Variants, and Master Rank Hunts

In addition to previously announced new and returning monsters, Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak will bring a few new ghoulish getups for monsters you know and love. For Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate fans, that game’s flagship monster, the fearsome Seregios, will make a return, more powerful and terrifying than ever before, with bleeding damage returning too. There’s also a few new elemental variants to monsters that first appeared in Monster Hunter Rise — we previously saw a very toasty-looking Bishaten, but now we’ve gotten a look at Aurora Somnacanth and Magma Almudron. The former swaps out Somnacanth’s sleep abilities with an ice-cold move set, while the latter swaps the Almudron’s mud pool for a lava pool, imbuing the (annoying) monster with plenty of fiery wrath.

You’ll also be able to embark on Master Rank hunts for many of the previous monsters featured in Monster Hunter Rise. These hunts give the monsters more health, more damage output, and new attacks and behaviours, so they’re likely to give you a bit of a run for your money and break you out of that muscle memory.

Follower Quests

This is a very interesting addition; Sunbreak will bring with it a host of new single-player missions called Follower Quests. These missions will let you team up with story characters, such as Rhondine, Hinoa and Minoto, and plenty more as you hunt monsters, gather materials, and generally do the usual quest stuff you’d normally be doing solo or with friends online. Followers will fight alongside you in combat, and can heal you, ride monsters, and distract monsters too to help you out as you hunt. You’ll be able to unlock more characters to fight alongside you as you progress through these missions and Sunbreak’s story.

Evolved Hunter Actions bring huge QOL additions

And here we get into the real meat of the expansion and update, the quality of life additions. The list is pretty exhaustive, and not everything has been revealed yet, but here’s the headliner. There’s a new ability called Switch Skill Swap, which lets you change between two sets of Switch Skills on the fly while you’re out on a hunt, something that hunters will be very happy to see. There’s also an evasive skill attached to this called Swap Evade, which lets you line up big dodges as you’re switching between skills to avoid getting caught out while vulnerable.

There’s a few smaller QOL additions as well, including being able to wall run without wiredashing first — great news for fans of Rampages like me — as well as being able to choose whether you want to ride a monster you’ve downed (previously the own option) or continue attacking it in its vulnerable state. There’s also a bunch of new options for controller rebinding, which is a small addition in the grand scheme of things but will surely be massively helpful for those who want or need it.

The Pro Controller

Yup, there’s a new Nintendo Switch Pro Controller coming alongside Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak, much like the one that came with Monster Hunter Rise itself. Like the MHR controller, this one will feature a fancy motif of the game’s flasgship monster, this time the Malzeno, but in a slick (if boring) silver this time instead of gold. If you’re a sucker like me, you probably started salivating the second you saw this, and it’ll be nice to complete the set when it launches alongside the expansion in June.

The controller is now available to preorder at the My Nintendo Store and JB Hi-Fi so far.

Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak will launch digitally and in a retail pack including the base game on June 30, 2022. We’ll bring you details of its release and the release of the controller and amiibo as they become available. You can watch the full stream and a trailer below.