The easy line to draw from Wild Hearts–the upcoming hunting game from publishers EA and Koei Tecmo and developer Omega Force is Capcom’s Monster Hunter. Wild Hearts is a game about exploring large open areas, alone or with two other players, to take down gigantic monsters that move around the map as you fight them. And the developers don’t entirely shy away from that comparison–but they’re aspiring to do something much more than replicate Monster Hunter.

Speaking with Koei Tecmo’s directors, Kotaro Hirata and Takuto Edagawa through a translator, they acknowledged the relationship, saying, “When you’re making a hunting game, Monster Hunter is a huge presence in the genre, so we can’t say we drew on it for a strong inspiration, but it’s not like we didn’t know it was there while we were making our game.”