Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance used its latest trailer on Thursday, 3 September, to do something the base game never did: put a new Elder Dragon on screen and name it Gundoraja. The expansion also showed a second new monster, setting up a larger hunt list for players who have already moved past the first game’s opening roster.
That reveal lands now because the trailer was shown during PlayStation State of Play, where Capcom laid out the next step for the major expansion. Gundoraja is not just another beast in the crowd. It has a long, serpentine body, flies without visible wings and can call storms at will, which makes it feel closer to a force of weather than a simple hunt target.
The trailer places Gundoraja amid the harsh skies of the Skybound Eyrie, where inclement weather seems to swirl around it. A second mystery monster also appeared: small, Jagras-sized, emerging from the corpse of a Guardian Doshaguma while pushing out a strange gooey substance, then stretching the front half of its body to reveal oversized jaws. That kind of reveal does more than tease a roster update. It signals that Ascendance is widening the world of Monster Hunter Wilds, and doing it after the base game launched without a single Elder Dragon in sight.
That matters because the expansion is clearly borrowing the scale of Iceborne and Sunbreak, while also starting to answer the gap left by the original game. Gundoraja joins Kushala Daora, the wind-controlling Elder Dragon shown in the Windward Plains, and the trailer also confirms the return of Lao Shan Lung. In other words, Ascendance is not easing in with safer prey; it is moving straight into monsters built to bend the battlefield around them.
The Lao Shan Lung tease is where the expansion’s shape becomes clearest. Players will have a new home base called the Stronghold, and it appears to have been built to shield the settlements in the Forbidden Lands from that Elder Dragon. The setup points to a defense fight built around cannons and other heavy weaponry, but the trailer also makes plain that hunters will still have to meet Lao Shan Lung head-on if they want to repel it or bring it down.
There is still a wrinkle in that promise. The Stronghold is shown as a bulwark, but not as a fully explained system, and the trailer does not spell out how much of the fight will depend on fortification versus direct combat. That leaves the hunt sounding bigger than a standard boss battle, with players likely balancing siege-style defense against the series’ usual close-range pressure.
Nata’s presence gives the story its human measure. The character appears older after the time-skip, along with other younger figures who have grown up in the expansion’s timeline, which confirms that Ascendance is not simply adding monsters but pushing the world forward. What remains unknown is how soon players will be able to test Gundoraja, Lao Shan Lung and the Stronghold for themselves, because Capcom has not yet set out the next step beyond the trailer.
