Nodus Fall Revealed: HoYoverse's Monster Hunter Rival

Geoff Keighley opened Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026 with the HoYoverse logo, and I sat there waiting for a banner trailer. Another anime city, another five-star character spinning through a cloud of petals, another release date I would ignore until a friend told me the new unit broke the game. Then the screen filled with fog, a grey marsh, and something enormous wading through the water on legs the size of siege towers. No cel shading. No pastel palette. Fifteen seconds in I put my coffee down.

The game is called Nodus Fall, and HoYoverse pitched it on stage as an original co-op action game where you play a weaver in a world whose divine order has collapsed, hunting mythic beings with coordination and tactics. Three minutes of trailer, then the title card, then nothing. No date, no window, no platforms, no price. The studio that publishes Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero opened the biggest showcase of the European calendar with a game that shares none of their visual DNA, and then walked off stage without telling anyone when to expect it.

I've been covering HoYoverse reveals for years and I have grown used to a rhythm: bright colours, a gacha economy underneath, a mobile build at parity, a launch date within nine months. Nodus Fall breaks that rhythm on the first frame, and I want to walk through what the studio showed, what leaked before the show, and why I think this is the most interesting thing anyone put on the ONL stage tonight.

The trailer, shot by shot

The footage moves through a handful of environments and each one has a different creature problem. That fog-bound marsh with the giant beasts wading through it opens the piece. From there the camera cuts to a canyon under a burning sky, where a horned giant rises out of flame. Later a white-haired archer and two companions fight a winged, many-limbed thing on a rain-lashed grey sea. A horned dragon breathes fire at a swordsman. A pale phantom warrior fights alongside a lion-like beast. The last shot before the title is a ghostly white face with tendrils spreading across the screen.

The narration talks about weaving calamity along silken paths, malice taking root, and ten suns rising as the old stories described, before the weavers came forth. Ten suns is the Chinese myth about the ten sun-crows who all rose at once and scorched the earth until an archer shot nine of them down. HoYoverse building a hunting game on that foundation gives me more confidence than the visuals do. The studio's writers know that mythology and they have a track record of mining it without turning it into wallpaper.

The stage screens carried a tagline: "Wield Divinity. Sever the Dreadnodus." So the monsters have a proper noun, the player role has a proper noun, and the studio has committed to the kind of invented vocabulary that either builds a world or buries it. PC Gamer's write-up joked about the pile of proper nouns, and I laughed, then thought about how many hours I have spent explaining Abyss Order lore to people who asked me a simple question about Genshin.

Three players on screen at once, from the shots that show a full team. One character revives an ally. Weapons on display include greatswords, standard swords and bows. A warrior lands a lightning-charged attack. There's a mounting animation that could be a full climbing system or a finishing move; the trailer cuts before I could tell.

The bit that makes me sit up: this is Unreal

Genshin Impact runs on Unity. So does Honkai: Star Rail. So does Zenless Zone Zero. Nodus Fall runs on Unreal Engine 5, which HoYoverse has been building toward through job listings and a tech demo referenced back in 2025.

Changing engine for a flagship project costs a studio years. You rebuild your tools, retrain your artists, rewrite your animation pipeline, and lose the shortcuts that a decade of internal tech gave you. HoYoverse chose that pain, which tells me the fidelity in tonight's trailer represents a target rather than a marketing render. A company doesn't switch engines to make a prettier version of the game it already ships. It switches to make something its old pipeline refuses to produce, and I think that something is weight. Genshin combat floats. Zenless combat snaps. The footage tonight has drag on the animations, and the leaked test builds from earlier this month back that read up.

For me the engine choice also answers the platform question that HoYoverse skipped on stage. A UE5 open world with this creature density points at PC and current-gen consoles. PlayStation Universe already covered the reveal as a PS5 title with no date attached, and I'd put money on a PC and PS5 lead with Xbox close behind. A phone build at visual parity would surprise me more than anything in the trailer did.

The leaks got there first, and they got it right

Everyone who follows HoYoverse leak accounts saw this coming. Cognosphere, the Singapore entity that publishes HoYoverse games outside mainland China, filed a NODUSFALL trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Office on April 29, 2026, claiming priority from a Singapore filing the same day. The examiner issued a non-final office action on August 19, a routine request for more information, six days before the trailer ran. The filing covers game software, peripherals, clothing, toys, trading card games and esports services, so HoYoverse plans to treat this as a franchise rather than an experiment.

Then came the test footage. On August 12 and 13, leakers pushed out clips and screenshots from an NDA-locked closed test running on TapTap in China, listed there as a next-generation action game with a 16+ rating. The material described a dark fantasy open world with combat built around weapon weight and stamina management, large-scale boss encounters, a break-and-harvest loop where you tear parts off a creature and turn them into gear, and skill progression on individual weapons. Some sources referred to the project as The Weavers, others kept the Nodusfall codename, and older reporting traced the internal codename back to Genesis in late 2025.

I want to flag one detail from those leaks that the trailer left alone. Several accounts described a single customizable protagonist, a "Node Walker," instead of the four-character party HoYoverse has built three games around. Tonight's footage shows characters with distinct silhouettes and roles, which reads more like a class system than a roster. Those two readings can coexist: pick a class, build a hunter, join two friends. That structure would sit closer to Monster Hunter than to anything in the Genshin family.

The Monster Hunter question, and why the timing works

Capcom owns this genre. Monster Hunter World sold to an audience Capcom didn't know it had, and Wilds sold enormous numbers while splitting the community over performance and endgame depth in a way World never did. A chunk of that community is available right now, and a chunk of it has spent a year saying so on forums. KitGuru made the same point in its reveal coverage, and I agree with it: a rival launching into that gap has a real shot, which no one could say during the World years.

KitGuru also reports Nodus Fall targeting 2027, which would land it near the major Wilds expansion. HoYoverse said nothing about a date on stage, so treat that as a target rather than a promise. Even so, 2027 fits the evidence. A closed test in China this August, a trademark still under examination, an engine transition finishing up, and a Gamescom booth running August 26 to 30 in Cologne where the company plans to show Genshin, Zenless and Petit Planet. Nodus Fall gets the teaser this year and the hands-on next year.

Wilds also gives HoYoverse a target to beat on the technical side. Capcom shipped a game that struggled on PC hardware people had every right to expect it to handle. If HoYoverse turns up in 2027 with three-player hunts running clean on a mid-range rig, that alone converts players. I've watched this studio optimize an open world down to phone hardware for five years. Whatever else I doubt about this project, I don't doubt their performance engineering.

Now the part I'm nervous about

Nobody on that stage said the word gacha, and nobody said the word premium either. HoYoverse built a portfolio worth billions on free-to-play with character banners, and the company kept that machine running at full speed this year, with Genshin's Snezhnaya chapter arriving on August 12 and Zenless celebrating its second anniversary on July 22. Asking them to abandon that model for their most expensive production yet is asking a lot.

Here's my worry in concrete terms. In a hunting game, your gear comes from the monster. You fight the thing, you break its horn, you build the axe. Every part of that loop rewards the player for playing. Drop a banner into it and the loop competes with the shop: your best weapon comes from a pull instead of a hunt, and the hunt turns into a chore you run for currency. Monster Hunter Outlanders has been wrestling with this exact tension on mobile. I don't want to watch HoYoverse solve it with a pity counter.

The version I want: sell me the game once, charge me for cosmetics and expansions, and let the crafting bench decide who has the best greatsword. Beebom's writer read the trailer the same way, guessing that everything on screen points to a traditional co-op action game without gacha mechanics. I hope that read holds, though I'd note that HoYoverse has never shipped a premium game and habits run deep.

My second worry is dailies. If Nodus Fall arrives with resin, with a stamina bar gating how many hunts I run per evening, with a login calendar and four commissions before the fun starts, the combat won't save it. The whole appeal of a hunting game is that you can lose a Saturday to one monster because you chose to.

What I'd ask HoYoverse at the booth this week

Three things, in order. First, business model, because it changes what this game is. Second, whether the co-op scales past three, since every shot I've seen caps at a trio and an MMO framing keeps appearing in leaks that the trailer doesn't support. Third, whether solo players get a full campaign, because Siliconera raised that question in its reveal write-up and the answer decides whether I recommend this to friends who play alone.

The company's booth runs through the end of the week in Cologne, and HoYoverse hadn't posted a standalone announcement on its own channels as of the premiere. Everything on the record comes from one trailer and one stage introduction, which is a strange way to launch your most ambitious project. I read that as a studio protecting a long runway rather than a studio hiding a problem.

Where I've landed

Fan reaction tonight ran hot in the direction I expected. VGC collected comments along the lines of "so this is where the Genshin billions went," and that sentiment matches mine. HoYoverse has printed money for five years and the obvious move was another anime live-service title in a fresh setting. Instead the studio spent that money on an engine change, a photoreal art pipeline, a genre it has never touched, and a tone that has more in common with Elden Ring than with Teyvat.

I've been asking for this game for three years and I'm aware that makes me a soft target for a good trailer. So let me hold the line where it belongs: nothing tonight showed me a health bar, a stagger meter, a crafting screen or thirty uncut seconds of one player fighting one monster. Trailers hide those. Test builds don't, and the ones that leaked in August looked promising.

Ziggurath will be on the show floor in Cologne this week. If HoYoverse has anything playable behind that booth, I'll be first in the queue and you'll get the impressions the same day.