Ultimate/G-Rank expansion announced

We all knew it was coming, and Capcom finally announced it yesterday: there's an Ultimate/G-Rank expansion to the game coming that they've titled Monster Hunter World: Iceborne.

As with previous Ultimate/G-Rank expansions for Monster Hunter games, Iceborne will feature:

• A third difficulty level above Low Rank and High Rank: G Rank. G Rank monsters are tougher, typically feature at least once additional attack, and of course will get you all new equipment.
• New maps/locales. At least one new full one, hopefully a couple.
• New monsters. The tease toward the end of red eyes in darkness seems pretty clearly to a monster from previous games called Nargacuga. All the rest is speculation for the moment.
• They're also teasing new moves, and no one is really sure what that means yet. It could mean a few new attacks for each weapon, or it could mean the addition of something like "hunter arts" or "styles" from Monster Hunter Generations.

The expansion releases sometime in Autumn 2019. We do not know the cost yet. I imagine it will not be less than $20 or more than $40.

The big questions now are how many new monsters (and which ones) and how many new full locales.

The trailer teases multiple new locations, but for all we know there could be only one full location and one boss location, like the ones for Zorah and Xeno.

I expect 10-12 new monsters, although this may well include palette swaps like Gold Rathian, Silver Rathalos, and Jade Barroth. Since they're teasing an ice location, I would not be surprised to see Barioth. Oroshi Kirin will almost certainly be there, as he is an ice monster and was on a previously leaked list. Alatreon will probably also be in it, as he is the only other monster from the leak list who never materialized for this version of the game. Beyond that, I expect there will be a couple of new original monsters and a mix of some returning favorites. The one I'm really hoping to see is Zinogre--I was a little shocked that he wasn't in this game to begin with.

It's a pity that this expansion is coming so long after release. Other Monster Hunter games typically saw such an expansion 12-15 months after release. This one will be more like 20 months. Understandable, since they're dealing with new tech and don't have the option of recycling any code as they did with the previous games. But it's going to be a long wait.

In the meantime, they announced some other updates to the game, including:

• Arch-Tempered Kulve Taroth (December 20th, 2018 ~ January 3rd, 2019)
• Appreciation Fest (January 2019)
• Arch-Tempered Nergigante (spring 2019)
• All-new collaboration with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (early 2019)

...which you can find out more about by watching this developer update:

Looking forward to this! Kind of interested in finding out how they reconcile the existing "tempered" and "arch-tempered" monsters with G-rank. Like, are we looking at facing down a G-rank, arch-tempered Lunastra at some point in the future?

I've pretty much been playing MHW through all of 2018, so it will be nice to have a little break in 2019 and pick it back up at the end of the year.

I know what you mean with the tempered/arch-tempered stuff. All of that seemed like a temporary band-aid while G-rank wasn't present. As you say, it's not clear how they're going to integrate those systems.

I'm definitely feeling a bit of burnout myself. I'm at around 600 hours played. These days I jump on to do whatever new event quest will get me more cool new equipment, particularly the gamma armor from AT monsters, which has typically been pretty powerful. But other than that, yeah, I'm happy to leave it alone for a little while until the expansion is ready. Besides, my brother recently gifted me a Switch so that we could play Generations Ultimate together, so there's that. :-P

Will this impact the base game at all for new players or is this purely for those already in the end-game?

I'm excited. Loved MH: World back at launch and stopped playing eventually when I felt like I had had enough. While prepping my GB GOTY list, I went through and played a little bit of various games on my list to get a fresh opinion and jog my memory etc.

Tossed MHW in and at first I felt slightly overwhelmed because I was like.. oh right.. Theres a lot of fun complexity to this. I probably can't just drop in and have fun. But then I went out on an ancient forest expedition and just started wandering around. Came across a Deviljo (which I hadn't seen before) and tore his shit up. Then a Bezelgeus I think? Then an Anjanath. Rathian etc. It caught me off guard how natural and comfortable I felt. How fun it still was and it reminded me of how god damn amazing this game is. Bumped it from #4 to #2 on my GOTY list.

Can't wait for new stuff. I hope its a bunch of new monster designs in terms of skeletal frames/animations/designs, either original or from previous entries.. And not so many reskins. That gets boring fast.

@dgtlty: So far details are sparse, but I would *guess* that the monster(s) and map(s) being added would have low rank quests associated with them so that they would be available in low rank in addition to the "end game" which was high rank in the base game but will become G rank with the expansion.

True in a lot of cases, but historically it has been a mix. Some monsters will be given low-rank versions. Others may only appear in G rank, in the same way that some monsters in the base game only appear in high rank (e.g. Pink Rathian, Azure Rathalos). But this is just what they've done in the past. No one really knows yet.

As someone who basically hasn't paid attention to any of the new content they've added to Monster Hunter World since Deviljo, I'm very much looking forward to an excuse to jump back in... although I guess it won't be for a while. I found the end game of MHW to be... kinda lacking, and the idea of grinding my way up to arch-tempered variants of monsters didn't appeal to me all that much. A proper G-rank would fix that immensely.

People are saying that if Nargacuga is in, then that means Tigrex and Barioth are probably in too since they share a skeleton. Wouldn't be surprised if we saw a couple G-rank variants of preexisting monsters too. Rusted Kushala Daora seems like an obvious one.

I hope they've been working to get skeletons of some of the legacy monsters into the new game. I always had a fondness of the Carpaceons in particular, so if Daimyo Hermitaur and Shogun Ceanataur were to show up, I would be thrilled.

I don't think there'll be monsters appearing at low-rank, and if there are, they're gonna be entry level monsters, on the Jagras/Ya-Ku tier. But, since it IS mostly DLC, I'd hedge my bets on it being that you have to get to high-rank as a minimum before you're able to access the new continent.

Definitely looking forward to this, Monster Hunter was one of the games I got into the most this year, and any excuse to continue playing it will always do well with me.

I'm a lance main, so I have fond memories of farming Hermitaur in the other games because he was usually a pretty decent early Guard armor. Him and Barroth. Would definitely love to see Hermitaur back. Ceanataur is cool, too. There are certainly a lot of monsters I'd like to see return.

I kinda suspected this is where things were going. They've spent most of the back third of 2018 catching up the PC version with the console versions and not really putting out substantial new content, barring the holiday stuff. I figured they were working on something big.

Hopefully they release this at the same time on PC as consoles. Be a real bummer if, after all the catching up it's done, it gets delayed a couple months.