Earlier today I reported about the first trailer of Monster Hunter Online, a free to play MMORPG born of a rather peculiar collaboration between the Chinese MMO giant Tencent Games and Capcom.

Tencent also opened the new official site (in Chinese, of course) and published the first batch of screenshots of the game.

The pictures, that you can see below, definitely show the Monster Hunter franchise in a new light. We're used to see it rendered by engines that aren't exactly the state of the art and by consoles that don't exactly shine in graphical muscle, but CryEngine 3 on PC really seems to bring the world and the monsters to life in a way that before we could only dream of.

Time to say farewell to flat textures and low-polygon models? Maybe not quite yet, but this is definitely a nice step in the right direction.