Monster Hunter World Catch-All

escher77 wrote:

Not sure what platform you are on but at least on PS4 imagine a big wave of players will be back when the new DLC drops. We often had a party up with bunch of people doing all sorts of things that you can always just ask questions in.

I am on the XBox.

I will probably go back to try it eventually. I bounced hard off of Dark Souls the first time I tried it, and went back a couple of years later and ended up finishing Dark Souls II and really enjoying it. I strongly suspect it is due to lack of regular time to play it, and that lack of regular playtime means I end up needing to figure out what I was doing and what I needed to do.

The part I played was really enjoyable. Especially finding out how each weapon worked and the patterns of each monster. And the environments are incredibly pretty as well.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Does it get to that Monster Hunter gather-hunt-harvest loop pretty quickly, or am I going to have to suffer through more story sequences and more holding run while exciting things happen around me?

IIRC, there's just the one first sequence getting you to the camp and then they throw you into the main loop really quickly. You'll have to suffer a few more story missions but they do put you a bit more in the center of the action.

The DLC is making a return to this very tempting... we burned out at the double-bagel fight. Hopefully after we move we can set up the second PS4 more permanently and give this another go.

mudbunny, I definitely had to turn to the forums and some YouTube videos to learn how to play because the in-game tutorials only scratch the surface. I don't love that about it, but if you put in some of that up-front time, the gameplay loop may grab you.

I have to say, you guys talking about double-bagels and stupid thunder ponies has me really interested to see the late game.

I enjoy the thunder pony fight. Double-bagels are terrible. Don't worry clock more than people have talked about here too like Pickles.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

not poorly-dubbed knock-off Tomb Raider.

I keep forgetting this game has other language options than "Native Monster Hunter Tongue" or whatever they called it. It's clearly Japanese voice actors but they're speaking this exotic sounding gibberish that has just become the game world's tongue for me. So when I see cut-scenes or footage that's dubbed into English it's even more jarring than my typical weeb response to setting everything to Japanese.

As for the game itself, you jerks are making me want to go back to it. I may just repurchase it digitally so I don't have to keep swapping discs out.

mudbunny wrote:

I played about 20 hours or so (after the first giant boss battle that takes you to your second base and spent about 4 or 5 hours there) and just found the gameplay loop just not enjoyable. Seemed like just too many different systems and not enough (in-game) guidance on how to properly use them.

I think the devs lean a little close to that old-school idea of letting the player discover things on their own. This is definitely true for all of the monsters and kind of true about most of the weapons. The Charge Blade daunts people with its intricate moveset, but the truth is, the Sword and Shield is probably more complex on the high end of the skill ladder just because you aren't locked into any combo and you can use any item at any time, so you have a lot of options for dealing with any specific situation.

So far the relevant systems I know of are these:

1. Food System. Don't sweat it. Just get the Chef Special every time if you don't want to think about it. It's good enough. If you're looking to optimize, there's a systematic way to understand what's going on, but it's a stepwise approach to learning how to order food. I suggest starting off with the Food Skills.

2. Fishing and Harvesting, Meat Grilling. I don't much bother with these. There are pools in certain areas that will give you nice fish and I'll do that for a change from time to time. If you don't want to fish, you're not losing much. Totally optional.

3. Items and Loadouts. You can customize the way items are arranged within your hotkey selection, and you can use the right joystick to activate items quickly - also customizable. If you want to save your arrangement, go to the chest and save your item loadout. It will also save your inventory selection to the same slot and pare down/re-up all items in your inventory to match the saved state.

4. Armor Skills. Each armor piece comes with a special power or boost that can interact with boosts from other pieces to achieve better states. Sometimes the description is misleading or not enough, but it's mostly obvious or descriptive. For instance, Guard is a skill that improves how well you use your shield. Higher levels of Guard reduce knockback and stamina loss, but the improvement is stepwise. That is, level 2 Guard and level 1 Guard are usually identical with respect to a specific monster attack's amount of knockback on a shield, so you don't necessarily benefit from Guard 2 with every monster.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I mentioned this in Slack, but I started this the other night and just had a tough time getting going with it. The opening with lots of cutscenes and cinematic action sequences just didn't work for me. Dyni described the classic Monster Hunter opening as "dump 'em and stump 'em" and I guess that's more what I was expecting, not poorly-dubbed knock-off Tomb Raider. Then my power went out, so I just went to bed.

Does it get to that Monster Hunter gather-hunt-harvest loop pretty quickly, or am I going to have to suffer through more story sequences and more holding run while exciting things happen around me?

I'd say the official "story" goes for about a hundred hours, but they dump you into the main loop shortly after the main base tour. Once you're going after the pink T-Rex, you're well into the main game loop. A lot of people will tell you not to bother hunting monsters for low-rank armor since that will all become irrelevant in High Rank, but I spent a fair bit of time mucking around Low Rank on my first foray into MHW as a monster hunter newbie.

The second time I went on campaign on PC, I went through Low Rank like a hot knife through butter. I wasn't hurrying or anything, but the monsters were just too easy, so I made a beeline for the High Rank hunts almost immediately.

The game was on sale for $20 on Xbox a day or two ago so I caved and bought it. Looks like something I should be into in the rare moments I get to sit down and play. Thanks to LarryC for the system breakdown!

What LarryC said.

ActualDragon wrote:

IIRC, there's just the one first sequence getting you to the camp and then they throw you into the main loop really quickly. You'll have to suffer a few more story missions but they do put you a bit more in the center of the action.

LarryC wrote:

I'd say the official "story" goes for about a hundred hours, but they dump you into the main loop shortly after the main base tour. Once you're going after the pink T-Rex, you're well into the main game loop.

Good to know! Thanks!

Lots of Iceborne stuff coming out lately.

Story Trailer:

Looks like there's a brand new hub area. It shows the return of Tigrex, one of my favorite monsters from the series, and the slash across the screen at the end looks like it could be a tease for Glavenus. That would be great.

Capcom has also been posting short videos showing off all the new changes for each of the weapons. Gaijinhunter posted a very handy summary video of all those changes, as well as a chart to easily compare them side by side:

I'm not quite sure why they're dumping so much information on us three months before release, but I'm not complaining!

Hopefully, it's because they have so much content they have to start this far out just to make it.

So I double dipped and grabbed it on the PC. I don't think I can go back to ps4

Performance on PC looked really nice compared to console, but I haven't picked it up yet with Iceborne not coming until later.

From the MH twitter.

"Get a taste of the wintry Hoarfrost Reach with the #Iceborne Betas on PS4!
PS Plus members play June 21-23.
All PS4 players hunt on June 28-30"

I'm there!

Tried the Beta for Iceborne. Of course, I tried the Tigrex hunt first, because why not. I was doing pretty well, but I ran out of time unfortunately

Anyone else playing this weekend?

I'll just be doing the Limited Bounty.

I spend some time in the training room with a few weapons and tried the Banbaro hunt in the new area, but won't be able to spend as much time with it this weekend as I might like. It doesn't take much to get me excited for more Monster Hunter, so I'm pretty happy to just wait for release.

The new area, or the small part they're including here, seems neat. There were destructible trees and the Banbaro seemed to move around the map quite a bit. Walking through the snow was pretty.

New moves on the lance and both bowguns were modest. Bowguns have some new mods. The slinger and claw stuff was pretty intuitive and fun.

I hadn't seen the new ability to upgrade mantles and boosters. The stealth mantle had two level three gem slots on it that are active while wearing the mantle.

Iceborne will apparently be the last World expansion (but we already expected that). There will be further updates after, so. They'll likely add a handful of monsters at the end, at best.

But!

MHW is the best selling game Capcom has ever released to date and it seems like they're already early in developing the next iteration.

If Tri and MH4 are any indication, they'll keep the assets they already have for World, dump it all into the next game, and add an entire game's worth of additional monsters on top! Things are looking good.

I'm just hoping they completely change the co-op party styles to be far, far closer to squadding up in Destiny. I sincerely think one of the reasons my friends and I play Destiny so often instead of other games is because of how easy it is to just group up together.

Also: don't force me to play every story mission solo first.

ccesarano wrote:

I'm just hoping they completely change the co-op party styles to be far, far closer to squadding up in Destiny. I sincerely think one of the reasons my friends and I play Destiny so often instead of other games is because of how easy it is to just group up together.

Also: don't force me to play every story mission solo first.

I doubt they'll do that, but the more I think about it, the more I think it would make the game better if that was an option.

ccesarano wrote:

I'm just hoping they completely change the co-op party styles to be far, far closer to squadding up in Destiny. [snip]

Could you elaborate? I've played Destiny in the past, but it's been a while. It was nice when they added the option to return directly to the gathering hall after a hunt, but having to return to the larger village where you couldn't see other players for certain shops is kind of a downer. Otherwise, I'd just group up with friends either directly or via our guild session.

I didn't really hit the solo cutscene issue lots of people hit playing MHW for the first time with friends. That did sound like a bummer so I hope they adjust that.

In Destiny, you open a menu, switch to friends list, and invite a buddy into your fireteam. You don't need to post a quest or anything, you just have a fireteam leader that selects quests and takes you to destinations and etc. Monster Hunter World isn't a huge problem once you're used to it, but someone has to first accept a quest, and then it's open to "everyone" unless you specify privacy settings. Then, when the quest is done, you have to do it again for the next.

It's easier to just form a group and go do everything together. Monster Hunter World requires you to group up again every instance. And considering I had a lot of friends that played more than I did, as well as friends that weren't so hot that played less, it meant our efforts to play co-op would be handicapped by the single player system. On the other hand, old players can just join in on new players in Destiny any time, even if it's their first time doing a mission.

Monster Hunter World's campaign is clearly designed to "be a tutorial" of sorts for the end-game content, so I understand why they designed it as they did. It's just not great when you have a crew of regular co-op players that are all used to just squadding up. It would be preferable if MHW was better built for that kind of play.

You shouldn't have to regroup for every quest. I think the key thing to achieve what you're describing is that you and your friends should all join the same multiplayer session. Unless you choose to play offline, every player is in a session.

If you access the menus in game, you should see your session ID. Your friends can search by your session ID, or you can invite them directly to your session via friends list. The easiest way is probably to create your own squad/guild. This represents a common session anyone in the squad can join whenever they start playing so you can easily find other members currently online.

Players in the same session can see each other in the Gathering Hub and can see and join quests other players post. 4 players max per quest and 16 players max per session.

After a quest, you should all remain in the same session.

This isn't the usual multiplayer flow, as you point out, and isn't super intuitive to understand so that isn't ideal. I hope for Iceborne they also allow all players to experience (or skip) the cutscenes even first try at a quest.

I know all those things as well, and also get that it helps with the more social aspects so that anyone in a Guild or Clan can be in the social space. It's still a less smooth experience than Destiny, and really most other co-op games of the sort. I chose Destiny as it's the best comparison I personally have, not because I believe it to be the best option available.

That said, I'm also a big Nintendo fan so I'm kind of used to Japan just doing things their own way.

I'm playing on Steam. Steam ID is roxlimn2k. Friend me up! I'm the one with a profile; the other one is my wife.

I'm pretty much done with my must-haves and I'm just playing around with armor sets, match ups, and alternative weapons. I main CB, but I'm doing Gunlance, LBG, and Switchaxe too.

In particular, I can go with interested parties and help out. The only monsters I can't help with are Behemoth and KT. I've never been able to solo them well.

There won't be a Summer Festival before Iceborne. Instead, it'll be all the Festivals, one each week starting the 26th. A week each is about enough time to finish all that content before Iceborne hits in September.

Arch Tempered Kushala Daora and Arch Tempered Nergigante are out on PC! It's the home stretch before the festivals so get those blades sharp!

In other news, I finally got my daughter into MHW in a big way and she totally gets it. A lot of MHW video and sizzle reels are about the payoffs and the flashy or failing hunts, but that's because that's the spectator-friendly part of MHW. There's also the chill part - the preparation. And more than any other game of this type, MH asks you to prepare for a hunt.

My kid finally got this. So when hunting LR Odogaron, she dispensed with heading straight for him. She researched his weaknesses. She leveled up her Palico gadgets. She foraged for healing materials and buffing items. Then she figured which status effects were best to use against Odogaron, and how to chain them together for maximum lockdown. She even planned to use the Girros against him.

This constituted "hunting" the monster and took the better part of three hours. Then she launched the quest and dispatched the monster in 8 minutes. It a was a glorious payoff and she was rightly pleased with herself!

Woo! Always good to see a new monster hunter.

Had the itch to play again lately after almost a year hiatus and man is this game good. It's a great time to come back with the event going on that gives a bunch of free stuff along with opening up all sorts of past events.