Will Monster Hunter Wilds Fix Co-Op?

I bought Monster Hunter World back in the day to play the game cooperatively with a few friends and was extremely disappointed to find that the game had what I maintain is to this day the single worst implementation of co-op features I have every seen in any game ever, especially one that advertised team play as a core feature.

To recap, the co-op experience went something like this.

  • Load into mission solo

  • Proceed through the mission until you trigger the cutscene introducing the new monster

  • Quit out of the mission

  • Load friends into co-op game lobby

  • Restart mission

  • Play and complete mission

  • Repeat the entire process again with friend #1 as host, as they don't get credit for completing the mission unless they go through all the steps above as well

  • Repeat the entire process again with friend #2

  • Repeat the entire process again with friend #3

Now, once you had fully beaten the game you could play the endgame content without these headaches and the experience improved significantly, but I bought the game specifically with the intention of playing through it with my friends, not to play the whole thing by myself and then and only then have a co-op experience that wasn't absolutely miserable to get through.

I actually skipped Monster Hunter Rise when I heard it had the same unfathomably bad co-op implementation as World. The fact that you cannot just join a co-op lobby, progress through the mission together, trigger the cutscenes together, and get credit for completing missions together is genuinely an impossible to understand design choice. For a game with co-op as a central feature I am truly incapable of understanding why it was implemented this way. It remains to this day the single worst co-op multiplayer system I have ever seen make it into a final, professional product.

And it's a shame because the game is super fun and outside of this singular, mind-bogglingly terrible system the game was great and I enjoyed it a lot. I was blown away to learn they did not fix this with Rise.

So now I am asking, do we know if this has been fixed for Wilds? If so, it's an easy buy for me, but if not what is the possible justification for persisting in this completely insane system? It is genuinely so outrageously terrible it cost them at least 4 sales with the sequel.