I remember Archie showing an interest in how Monster Hunter veterans would perceive the revamped World, and seeing as Robio is on a long hiatus, that only leaves me. I'll be adding to these impressions as I go, so far I've only done a few of the earliest quests and have only fought one larger monster, the Jagras.
First things first, graphical fidelity in this game is unprecedented for the Monster Hunter series. Seriously it's so sharp it sears my eyes. The World suffix relates to how the stages you fight in are no longer divided in seperate, smaller arena like areas, but are one interconnected whole. This is both very cool and rather annoying as it allows the devs to incorporate much more maze like level design, meaning it's harder to memorize everything. There is also a side effect that it's possible to be battling a large monster in a passageway between larger area's where movement is much more restricted. It still works, but it's nicer to have a bit more room to move around in.
Not only are the stages larger and more complex in terms of level design, the same can be said about the level of detailing. There is a lush look to the whole game, but I disagree with the devs in that this means every item of interest needs to be highlighted by your tracking flies as you pass it by. It breaks the immersion when every other piece of scenery starts glowing when you approach it.
And this brings me to the second big change in World: accessability. The game still requires a lot of your time, but a lot of the 'friction' has been removed. It's still early days, but for now I still long for the more purist experience of old. Some examples: you track down monsters by finding tracks, which results in your tracking flies picking up the scent of larger monsters, after which they guide you to it's current position. I understand how the devs deemed this neccessairy due to larger, more complex stages, but I feel it is detrimental to the need to learn the lay of the land like you did in earlier games. It's the difference of driving somewhere with a map or with the GPS enabled. You're just not as aware of your surroundings. The need to hit them with a paintball to keep track of them has also been thrown out, the flies keep tracking it, and you'll even get an icon on your map indicating the monster's current position. There's less friction, but also less skill involved.
Another immediatly apparent difference to older games is also the opening scene of the game. There are many more cutscenes to wade through, making the whole thing more action-ey and cinematic. It's clearly a play for the mainstream market. I didn't mind it, but it wasn't what I was expecting.
Controls and menu's are still more or less untouched, but crafting gear and weapons has seen a major change: you can level weapons down and get the monster parts you used on them back. I do not approve. It robs the leveling system of its sense of commitment. Nothing is final. It changes the forging and upgrading that is the main manner of progression within the game to something more resembling a skill tree. Interchangable.
So far all the rest has been sufficiently monster hunter-y. Everything is bigger and bolder, meaning there's a larger learning curve for returning players, but the core gameplay is still very much in tact. I'm wielding a Switch Axe, a weapon first introduced in MH4, and will probably swap it in and out for the trusty Hammer and a sprinkling of Hunting Horn for multiplayer. So far I'm enjoying it massively, but despite the game's play for accessability, I find it's larger level of scale to make the whole even more bewildring. I guess it'll just take some adapting.
I don't know, I don't really get the articune reference, unless it's the ice attack thing.
Either way, it was nice fighting a monster that felt new and unique. Even if it was still a bit easy. I fainted once after getting combo's by 2 ice attacks. It's starting to show that my gear is woefully underpowered. Still sporting the original leather coils and haven't upgraded any equipment yet.
I will say, that this guy did give me a lot of trouble in our first fight when I was using a Greatsword, but once I switched back to a bow I pretty much owned him.
Yeah, I kind of reverted back to my old habbit of using a Hammer. I've played some with a charge blade, which I really like as well, but it's just a bit more of a fuss. Sometimes I just don't want to have to commit to the rythm of changing back and forth between sword and axe mode. I think I'll start rocking a Hunting Horn once I start playing multiplayer.
Kind of a bummer that so many of the weapons look identical to eachother though. For example the barroth hammer in World is no where as cool looking as the one in previous MH games.
Joining people who are already on hunts and who have put out SOS signals is really easy, so it's really easy to pick up a game. my feelings on using the SOS signals are a little more mixed though. I sent one out and received help from one guy, which raise the difficulty level of the hunt to the multiplayer level. The guy immediately left and never help me fight though, so I was stuck with a harder difficulty setting and never got help from anyone. That was frustrating.
My biggest frustration though is I haven't had any luck figuring out how to find that group that keeps hunting with you over and over. Is that what Squads are for? I've just been joining people in hunts, and at the end of them they always break up.
I really don’t have any experience with how the multiplayer worked in the previous games so I can’t compare however I did like much of how it is done in this game. I played the vast majority of the game in multiplayer, probably 95% or more. The SOS system is for quickly jumping into hunts so people aren’t going to continue hunting with the same people in those. If you want to do hunts with the same group of people then you could do a search for online sessions. There’s a bunch of parameters that you can specify as to what kind of sessions that you want to search for to join such as those who are hunting specific monsters, types of missions, etc. Squads would probably be good as well or maybe better but I haven’t really checked out how that works yet. I don’t know if PS4 has something similar but on the Xbox One there is a feature called ‘Looking for Group’ which is an excellent way of finding like minded players for any game.
Hmmm I will look into that the next time I play. After spending yesterday afternoon with the game, and a little more this afternoon I've decided I'm just not up for diving into it just yet. I just wasn't having much fun with it. Maybe somewhere down the road. No complaints though. I spent just about a 100 hours with it. That's a good first round of Monster Hunter.
I played Co-op for the first time in Monster Hunter World. Like the other hunters here might remember, I bought the game on Xbone a couple of months back, with the intention to get it again on PC for co-op with a friend of mine. First impressions: for all the changes, the matchmaking is still even, if not more, archaic. Now there are proper story missions, with proper cutscenes, and they're neigh impossible to play through together. First of all, you can play these missions only once, so you need to be at the exact same point in the story to be able to play them together. Of course, the game doesn't want you to actually start them together, instead you both need to start solo, then you need to quit the quest and enter your friend's quest when he calls for help with an SOS flair. So far, so cumbersome. The SOS flair system works, but it's open to all hunters, so if you don't hurry, someone else might have joined your friend's quest before you got the chance to do so. We did this, but it didn't work very well, with the completion of the quest not getting recognized for the both of us, resulting in us having to go through it all a second time so both our games would recognize the quest as completed.
I'm also now playing through the Steam Link on my by this time slightly archaic FX6300 - 650 Ti Boost - 8Gig RAM desktop, which doesn't meet the minimum requirements for the game. My CPU just qualifies, but Capcom requests at least a GTX760. Still, I manage, although the game does look worse than on the Xbone. I'll have to try it on my computer monitor once too, to see how badly the streaming impacts the graphics and framerate. Playing on my telly though, the moment you start moving, everything becomes a muddy blur. I'm playing on low, with a few settings turned up a notch, selected a 30FPS frame cap and reduced resolution to 1600x900, which is slightly above how the Xbone renders it. Framerate is pretty uneven as well, and there's some imput lag, but I'm pegging both of those as down to the streaming.
Anyhow, it's still the same game. It's still fun, but heavily dumbed down. It's still fun to accidentally knock your mate into the air with your oversized weapon. I played solo with Hammer and Charge Blade, and am now rocking a Charge Blade and Hunting horn for co-op. The lure of the hammer is strong, but the hunting horn is pretty similar and allows you to buff your whole party, so I'm going to try to stick with the 2 weapon types I'm using now.
If you want to co-op with your friend or friends then have someone start an online session and give those you want to join your session code. You can password lock these as well so random people can’t join. When people are in your session you don’t need to send up an S.O.S. flare for them to join. They can just select “Join Quest in progress” at the message board. Everyone in your session will get a notification whenever someone starts up a quest. When someone starts a quest they will be the quest leader and you can wait for the other people to join and ready up before you start so everyone can take off and start the quest together.
That's marginally less of a fuss. Although, because I am playing the PC version, but away from my PC with only an Xbox360 controller within reach, I can not enter passwords, as it requires use of the keyboard.