I don’t like Monster Hunter. Despite multiple friends trying to pull me into different iterations of the series, it’s just never been my cup of tea. The graphics have looked good, the mechanics interesting, but it’s never grabbed me. Then I saw Monster Hunter Wilds.

To say the demo of Monster Hunter Wilds I saw at a behind-closed-doors Summer Game Fest preview was impressive would be my understatement of the year. It blew everything else I saw and played out of the water: The enormity of the world and its creatures, the fluidity as we moved from biome to biome seamlessly, the overwhelming options at your disposal in your pursuit of a beast. In one hunt, I saw a particularly hearty Doshaguma climbed on, sliced, shot, lured into a gigantic sandtrap created by a different monster to thin its herd, baited into a fight with a massive dragon that breathed lightning on the thing, chased into a massive sandstorm that turned day to night, had huge stalactites dropped on its head as it pursued our character through a cave, and finally finished off with the help of other hunters—and throughout, it seemed we’d only scratched the surface of the battles awaiting us in Wilds.