The next-generation consoles will be released in around one year, but one of the Monster Hunter World directors sees the future of the industry going beyond the now classic console war between PlayStation and Xbox.

　　Speaking with Eurogamer, Monster Hunter World Kaname Fujioka talked about the next generation consoles and the future of the industry as a whole. Speaking about a Monster Hunter game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett, Fujioka said that it's hard to say how the game would be, as the developer still doesn't know what the console manufacturers are trying to achieve with the new hardware beyond the graphics improvements over the previous generation.

　　For us it's not as simple as 'the graphics will look better', I think every time a new generation of consoles comes out the hardware has a concept behind it, or a mission statement of what it's trying to do best. We don't have that information yet, so until we know "this is the hardware that is coming, this is what it's planning to achieve, this is the kind of game that it's going to provide" - not just the process and the visuals but how online works - that kind of thing. We wouldn't be able to say what kind of game we could make.

　　Fujioka is seeing the future of the industry as hardware or platform agnostic, and so the Monster Hunter team would have to consider this when developing future entries in the series.

　　I would say the way things are looking like they're going at the moment, we're increasingly getting into a hardware or platform-agnostic industry, and the game experience is probably going to be available wherever you want it to be in future, so if that was the case and that's where things are going next-gen, we'd have to think about how to make the gameplay work independent of our assumption that we're even going to be sitting down to play. So that could be one of the ways it goes, but we also still need to find out, just like everyone else, what's coming out, when it's coming out, and what's it going to be.

　　If streaming services like Stadia manage to become popular, Fujioka's vision of the future could indeed become true, as players would no longer be forced to get specific hardware to play games. While this is likely not happening in the near future, it's a probable scenario that developers are starting to consider.

　　The immediate future of the Monster Hunter series seems solid, with the upcoming release of Monster Hunter World Iceborne, which looks like a solid expansion to one of the best entries in the series ever.

　　Monster Hunter World is now available on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Monster Hunter World Iceborne launches on September 9th on PS4 and Xbox One, and early next year on PC.