Unlike past MH games, where players were stationed at a static home village,
MH4 makes players into a member of a roving caravan. Hunters are hired by the caravan leader and travel with the caravan, visiting a variety of lands. The villages the caravan encounters along the way all have their own mayor and unique culture.
There are a lot of villages in the game, Tsujimoto said, and a lot of characters. Because the villages are so varied,
you'll also encounter a tremendous variety of characters. This is one way in which they hope to offer single players a greater feeling of drama, said Tsujimoto. For multiplayer, Tsujimoto expects that the drama will, like always, be made by players as they play.
The first village you'll visit in the game is called "Barubare." This village was made in the feeling of a marketplace to give players the sense of being in a gathering spot for many people. Players go to Barubare to register their hunters, and will find all the standard facilities one would expect of a Monster Hunter village.
Villages that are encountered later in the game also have the standard, required facilities, but some have special facilities that you won't find anywhere else. Fujioka hopes that in the end, players will select a village of their liking for use as their main base of operations.
Fujioka also discussed the game's new camera options.
MH4 adds a new "free camera" to the series. When implementing a free camera, one is usually concerned that the camera controls become too complicated. This is why they added a target camera to the game, first as an experiment in Monster Hunter 3G, and now in MH4. Fujioka is thankful that the 3DS allows for controls via the touch screen, as if the system only allowed for button controls, they would not have come up with the target camera idea.