Monster Hunter World!!!!!

Man, I am such an unfaithful lover. My #1 is the bow, it just meshes with me so well, and I enjoy having to maintain an elemental stable, but my eye is always wandering to other weapons. Maybe Insect Glaive would be fun? Ooh, or sword and shield looks cool. Everybody loves HH players, right? Damn, the Longsword looks kind of interesting. But I always drift back to the bow, and my wallet screams and cries from all the upgrades to other weapons I end up sticking back in the box after a few tries.

But the longevity it gives to the game is amazing. It will be a good long while now before I’m pulled away from Lance, but if I do ever git gud I could potentially replay the whole game with a different weapon if I so chose.

Yes, I am at 172 hours and I’ve barely touched Iceborne at all, just a couple of Assignments and some Optionals so far.

Oh my god, once you get to high rank you ought to be able to just meld/buy low rank crafting items, and the same for master/high. Forcing me to go out and manually harvest thirty five Quality Bones to craft a couple tiers of insect glaive is incredibly boring, especially when I go an entire expedition just getting thick/warped and not a single quality.

Taking my shiny new insect glaive and clearing out all the old Optional quests I had left over from Low/High rank. Thirty seven more to go!

FYI last night I did indeed see. Good lord, the monsters in IB are all on PCP.

They are. It is one of the disappointing parts of the expansion. Spazzing, while I suppose it adds challenge, I’m not sure it counts as fun challenge.

100% with you on this. And the enormous health pools don’t help either.

Told you. Though if you got Barioth down you have everything you need to beat most Iceborne monsters. Not that it will be easy, mind you. ;)

Barioth is very doable and a fun monster to fight when you know what to do. Once you break its wings, it starts to stumble all over the place and get very slow.

some weapons are much harder against certain monsters than others.

This is more an “end of MHW” note - but maybe it’ll be make its way back to the PC master race? Monster Hunter Rise was just announced for Switch. Looks like they doubled down on the clutch claw and made it into a spider-man “wirebug”.

Looks awesome!

Looking at the past history of MH, i doubt they will bring this one to the pc :/ it will probably be a portable exclusive… regardless it does look pretty good. Monster designs look really great

I’m a little sad and surprised that if they aren’t bringing Rise to the PC, that they wouldn’t keep pumping out additional expansions for MHW. I say that mostly because I have lots of fun with MHW, but most of that fun is because I can play with my son who carries me through the game. No way in heck I could survive a “real” MH game (neither the combat nor the hardcore grinding).

I think there’s a very strong chance that they are already working on MHW 2. It was such a huge success that a sequel is almost a given.

So I wonder if this will be more like MHW or more like a continuation of MHGU? I wasn’t able to make the step back from World to Generations but a new version along the line of Generations I think I could get into.

I’ve never played anything but World. What’s the most salient difference?

I didn’t spend much time on GU, but it seemed… deeper? Each weapon had multiple different styles (probably using the wrong term) and that sort of thing. It also felt like a really shitty handheld game compared to MHW, which I suppose that’s exactly what it was since I think it released initially on the 3DS. Teeny tiny zones the size of a large room, then load into the next, etc. Everything was more tedious too, like having to bring mining picks with you that would be consumed as you mined rocks. That sort of thing.

The controls also felt incredibly stiff, but part of that is design intent, I think. From what I recall, you were really completely locked into whatever animation you started with no wiggle room to shift or anything else. That one I probably could have gotten used to but coming back from World it just felt bad.

Longtime Monster Hunter fans seem to love MHGU, though. I think a lot of my problems were just moving from a AAA game I was playing on my PC to a 3DS game. It’s… jarring, which is why I think I might like a new version built for the Switch rather than a 3DS port.

I really should try it again. My play experience was seriously like… 2 hunts or something, I bounced off it really hard.

Monster Hunter has traditionally been a handheld game, and the first iterations didn’t have online play, so there’s this… history, I guess, of small-screen, local multiplayer hunting. The previous games are also where the Monster Hunter series gets its reputation for unforgiving difficulty and obscure systems. World was an attempt at making the game more accessible to a wider audience and at tailoring the experience for a home console with online multiplayer.

GU is deeper than World, as @KevinC mentions. Each weapon has six or seven different styles which really mix up how each one plays. You can equip one to three “arts,” which are special moves with a variety of effects. It allows for a lot of individual customization. There’s also a shit ton of armor and weapons - just pages upon pages of stuff to craft. And a lot more monsters and variations of monsters (although I think World is catching up). The fact that it has more content is to be expected - GU is basically the Game of the Year edition of that iteration of Monster Hunter.

But, GU (and the other handheld games) have basically none of the streamlining or accessibility that exists in World. Pickaxes and bug nets are consumables that must be crafted. No drinking while moving. No fireflies to lead you around. No picking up herbs and mushrooms on the fly. Most of the “tutorials” consist of one or two lines of text. And the limitations of the hardware are apparent, especially when compared to the visual feast that is World - each locale is split into ten or so different “rooms,” with a loading screen (albeit a short, almost non-existent one) between each.

Personally, I’ve put more time into GU on the Switch, despite starting with World. I can’t quantify it, but it does feel right to play Monster Hunter on a handheld. The Switch port isn’t any more detailed than the 3DS game, but it runs at a high resolution with a rock-steady framerate.

I don’t have a window into Capcom’s mind, but I imagine they will bounce the series between home consoles and handheld. So World, then Rise, then World 2, then Rise 2, and so on. I believe that handheld Monster Hunter is always going to be more popular in Japan, and World will be more popular in the West. It’d be smart of them to not abandon either market completely.

I thought MH Generations was their attempt at a more streamlined or user friendly MH game?