Fans of the Monster Hunter series now have one less thing to worry about when setting out on a new hunt. Hot drinks will no longer be a necessity for venturing out into cold areas, in Monster Hunter Rise.
The director of Monster Hunter Rise, Yasunori Ichinose, tweeted out that according to his own research, hot drinks are the most easily forgotten item when going out on a hunt. Whether that means he conducted an informal survey of sorts or he personally forgets to bring them all the time, hot drinks are not exactly the most universally useful item in the series. They have one use and that one use is to counteract freezing temperatures during hunts.
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What that effectively means is, not only are they only used for one thing, they're also only used on very specific maps. In the case of the most recent entry in the series, Iceborne, they were only used in precisely one location, the Hoarfrost Reach. The Frost Islands in Monster Hunter Rise would have likely required hot drinks had they remained in the game.
If players went to the Hoarfrost Reach or a cold location in an earlier Monster Hunter game and didn't drink a hot drink, then their hunter's overall stamina cap would decrease more rapidly than normal. This was an especially big deal in Iceborne as the stamina cap decreased at a significantly slower rate in general compared to past games, so not drinking a hot drink was quite likely the only way players' stamina cap would meaningfully decrease.
Naturally, though, this begs the question: will cold drinks also be omitted from Monster Hunter Rise? Just as there were hot drinks for cold areas, there were cold drinks for hot areas. They served basically the same, but reverse purpose, the only difference being that forgetting a cold drink would drain health similar to being afflicted with fireblight or poison.
However, cold drinks did also protect hunters from the heat produced by the Elder Dragons Teostra and Lunastra. It's possible that cold drinks will remain if Teostra and Lunastra do as well. Only time will tell.
Monster Hunter Rise will be released on March 26, 2021, for the Nintendo Switch.
