Ahead of Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance, Capcom has announced the removal of the game’s widely hated character edit vouchers, which force players to spend real money in order to re-edit their character’s appearance.
“With the launch of Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance in 2027, all players will be able to re-edit the appearance of their hunter and Palico as many times as they like, free of charge and without the need for a Character Edit Voucher, which will be removed from the game,” a post from the official Monster Hunter account reads.
Character edit vouchers will be removed from sale on December 3. It goes without saying that, now more than ever, you should not buy them. In their place, 10 character and Palico edit vouchers will be given to players to tide them over on customization until Ascendance arrives in 2027 (probably, but speculatively, in March).
The ability to repeatedly customize your character has been a premium feature in Monster Hunter for some time. Monster Hunter Wilds, in particular, is absolutely lousy with DLC, so it’s almost impressive that these vouchers stayed among the most-hated forms of microtransactions. It just plain sucks that, if you find that your character doesn’t look as you’d hoped or you suddenly have an idea for a new look, you have to break out the credit card. (On PC at least, you could thankfully bypass this with mods.)
Capcom framing the option to have unmonetized fun with a core game system as some fabulous reward is a bit strange. Stranger still is the planned release of “a token of our appreciation to everyone who has previously paid for Character Edit Vouchers.”
If you’ve purchased the three-voucher character, Palico, or combo pack, you’ll receive a “Special Thank-You Pendant Set.” Look, it’s hard not to read this as: thanks for tolerating our invasive monetization, here is a shiny thing, and hey, if you do want the shiny thing, you’ve got a few more weeks to buy soon-to-be-deprecated vouchers.
But good news is good news. Character edit vouchers are dead, may they rest in pieces. Monster Hunter players, to whom Capcom’s growing microtransaction library has not gone unnoticed, are practically dancing in the streets after the news.
“If a game gives you the option to change how your character looks they should not take money from you for changing it,” reads the top reply to a Monster Hunter Wilds subreddit post sharing the news. “Still great to see that we do that now.”
“They don’t deserve a goodbye,” says another user. “Into the trashcan and that’s it.”
“This is nice but these never should’ve been a thing to begin with,” adds a third.
The question now is whether Capcom will stick to this approach with the release of the next Monster Hunter game. If character edit vouchers return, expect to see Monster Hunter fans put some feet to some fire.