Seems like we’re overdue for a Monster Hunter thread! I know I’m not the only Monster Hunter fan in here.
I’m posting, regrettably, after getting Hyped by some prerelease advertisement:
My fellow Monster Hunter fans will recognize just how crazy a few seconds of that trailer really are, but, if you missed it:
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The player character is shown basically calling the Seikret (the rideable lizard buddy) and mounting it after making contact with it, while their Great Sword is drawn
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Seconds later, in the same sequence, the player character puts away their Great Sword, draws a Heavy Bowgun from a sling on the creature’s back, and starts firing while still mounted
It looks like some ideas that were in a bit of a rough draft form in Rise with the Palamute mounts are really getting leaned in on, with more seamless transitions between on-foot and mounted maneuvers, and even mounted combat maneuvers. I mean, whoa, switching between two weapons is crazy enough!! I wonder if that will mean that armor sets will basically have Blademaster and Gunner skillsets, which you switch between on the fly when you switch to a ranged weapon? Or maybe besides skills that have universal utility like Critical Eye or whatever, individual skills will have both a Blademaster and Gunner benefit–wasn’t there something like that in Rise?
In this other short video…
The lead developer guys talk about wanting to make the environment feel dynamic and hostile, and for the monsters to feel particularly threatening and dangerous, which sounds awesome to me.
One change from World/Rise that I thought kind of detracted from the gameplay overall was the more or less unlimited capability to leave a combat encounter and restock on healing items. Once you hit a certain skill level, this even kinda trivializes some, not all but some, of the difficulty of the game, since so long as you are careful and observant, you can fairly easily slip away from the monster and go and restock your healing items. There’s not nearly as much pressure to play as well as you can as there used to be, the time limits for hunts are so long too, you can deliberately take a much more relaxed pace. In the older games, there was no thrill quite like taking down a monster after chugging your last available Healing Potion, with just minutes to spare on the clock.
I wonder if part of what they will reintroduce is at least a little bit more of an emphasis on survival and resource management. I think in terms of game economy and resource logistics, the games before World had a lot of problems. No one liked shit like having to abandon and then restart a quest simply because you neglected to bring a Hot Drink to a cold area, I don’t really know what that added to the game. However, I also think they went just a little too far in the other direction.
So, maybe the whole thing where you can switch between at least 2 different weapons on the fly from the back of your mount is a sign that they are thinking about things like logistics and resource management in that way, perhaps it won’t be quite as permissive as World and Rise were. If not, it won’t be the end of the world, for me, since I can always just choose to play like I can’t restock healing items. When I was really going hard playing Monster Hunter World I did that, it was awesome.
Finally, bring back…
