Be Excellent To Each Other

Okay, so over the weekend I played a fair amount of the Monster Hunter World Beta, and I enjoyed a it quite a bit. There's not a massive amount of content, basically three hunts that you can play solo or multi.

As someone who's never played a Monster Hunter title ever, there were a few things that kinda bewildered me. Like, you're accompanied by a small anthropomorphic cat (at least in solo) that can heal you and attack the monsters. Because erm...Japan?

It doesn't really explain the weapons very much. And some of them are pretty weird. (For example, there's a big 'hunting horn' thing that you play buff songs on while attacking the enemy...couldn't get my head round that at all). The large weapons make Dark Souls' Ultra Greatswords seem sprightly. In fact the combat seems very slow in general. I suppose 'measured' is the correct word. You need to be patient and wait for openings.

The monsters are large and imaginatively designed. You can 'break' parts of them, and if you do enough damage to a leg, they start limping. There's also environmental hazards you can use against them, getting thrm trapped in vines, or the memorable moment an online party I was in led the monster to a crew of cat people who attacked it with ropes and and pulled it down, allowing loads of free hits.

It's basically Dark Souls + Horizon: Zero Dawn.

With little cat people.

Giphy "take my money":
https://media1.giphy.com/media/11dXgkMK7yQTsY/giphy-loop.mp4

Glad I made Giphy more accurate.

Oh yeah, online mode is 4 player, and apparently you can do any quest online.

Fifty pounds

Still sure there's a good game in there if you can get past the controls and lack of decent tutorial ingredients.

And the bobbins voice chat.

Besides it was worth Ian buying it just for the £50 well spent comment when we were all dancing.

I just didn't understand why everything refused to die.

...what's wrong with the controls? They aren't especially horrible, surely?

We're talking about MHU3 which Ian bought for £50 and we played once.

Oh. Right.

Cleeeeeeeeeeeeek.

They're doing another beta run on the 22nd.

Okay, so I got this. Digitally pre-ordered it, actually. Digitally Pre-ordered the deluxe edition. I know. I 'm part of the problem. I've played it loads. It is great. Going up against these massive monsters is still fucking amazing.

Each one really does have it's own personality. One picks up a rock and uses it as a weapon. Another will swallow one of the 'normal' monsters and use the extra bulk to try and squish you.

The game doesn't treat you special, if your quarry wanders into another monster while you are hunting it, they might fight, or one might run away. Quite often you have to deal with packs of smaller monsters while hunting the big one.

It's proper good.

This might be my next purchase.

I'd love to get into this but I just don't think I've got the spare time.

It would look great in your spread sheet though.

Theres a cool thing where if someone is struggling, they can send up an SOS and you can choose to go help. A bit like Dark Souls or Bloodborne.

I've played 30-odd hours of this, and I'm still loving it. The multi works really well, though I've found that the best way to get some action is just "respond to SOS" over and over. Seems most people just fire off a SOS flare on every quest they do. But yeah, I'm currently using an Insect Glaive, which is all about getting airborne.

53 hours now...

"Final Boss" beaten last night at the 83 hour mark. There's still loads to do, finishing up optional quests, even harder versions of monsters. And free DLC monsters too.

£10?

Downloaded version. Sorry Z.

(Note: MHW is the biggest selling Capcom game EVER! And the PC loser nerd version has yet to come out.)

What? No fucking way. Are you sure it's not best launch or anything?

I can't see this having shifted more copies that Street Fighter 2 or Resident Evil.

Japan, innit?

I mean, they quite like SF2 in Japan.

Well, it's going to be single version of a game. In this instance, this game has sold 7.5m copies in five weeks.

By comparison, Resident Evil 7 only recently sold over 7 million copies. Monster Hunter World has been out since Jan and done over 7 milli.

Most recent figure I can find for SF2 is 2008, with 6.3m.

7.5 in that timeframe is terrifying.

Oh, it's shipped, not sold. Still, the actual sales figures suggest they won't sit on retailer's shelves.

Christ.

MH always does crazy good in Japan. Now they've done Monster Hunter without as much arcane stuff, rough edges and added decent controls and opened it up to the rest of the world.

Monster Hunter 3rd Portable did 4.7m. In Japan.

This is a bewildering mess of a game.

The monsters look absolutely terrific; the graphics are lush; my furrytwat sometimes gets out a dingy and paddles along the water with me and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

The UI is terrible, the map doesn’t rotate, quests aren’t signposted, starting a quest is a maddening affair, the multiplayer is a bag of shit and won’t let players play the same mission unless they’ve already completed it even if their progress is identical to you, my inventory is jammed full of shit I don’t know what to do with, inventory management is clunky, basic attack isn’t X on the Xbox but rather Y, I don’t know what 90% of my weapons and armour do and whether to switch it up, some monsters just fuck off before you’ve killed them even after bashing them for literally 30 minutes and I’ve somehow acquired an armour set called something something ‘alpha’ for coming late to the party that means I’m taking sod all damage so far.

Good game though. I think.

Indeed. I'm sure there's a good game in there. It's just utterly impenetrable.

Alas, no crossplay, either.

I can't understand why the game gives you a set of armour that's better than anything you can possibly craft. Did they just decide that people wanted to ignore the equipment part of the game completely? It just completely removes any motivation for doing half the game.

It's for blitzing the original content and getting to the expansion as fast as you can. For Alts or people who played PS4 but now want to play on PC or vice versa.

I had to check what that armour was cause it’s leagues ahead of any of the others. Leather armour grants +1 but Guardian Alpha armour is a whopping +50, so why would I ever bother with anything else? Turns out it was only released alongside the DLC release of Ice World to help you smash through the main game so you can be suitably levelled for Ice World. (EDIT: wot he said)

Reading up, people are saying it removes the grind for gear between monsters which is apparently part of the “fun”. Grind is a dirty word in this house so it can fuck off while I wear some natty armour and teabag a dragon’s face with a hammer the size of a T-Rex’s nutsack.

This is now less bewildering.

Basically, you pick the biggest hammer you can find and bash big monsters craniums until they collapse. Sometimes when you smash a skull open and return to base your hammer gets bigger thanks to the bit of brain matter you’ve collected. There’s things that aren’t hammers but who wants to play with something that isn’t a giant hammer with the most raw damage output? There’re vendors that sell consumables, some that ask you plant stuff to get more stuff later and a bloke in a ship that sells stuff every now and again and people who give you quests that involve picking up mushrooms and shit. There’s a fighting arena for more stuff; a bloke who sells food to boost your stats for a quest; and some other crap. The list goes on. It feels more straightforward now.

But ignore all that, grab the cheap armour that avoids any grind and an increasingly bigger hammer and bash a skull in. Easy. This is surprisingly fun.

I’ve hit “High Rank” which basically means I’ve progressed the story which unlocks some new upgrades for weapons and new armour. The top armour has +43 defence so my starting armour is still the best at +50. Unfortunately you still have to grind monsters and minerals, mushrooms, herbs and the hundreds of other bollocks populating the land to get the materials to make my hammer even bigger than it is.

This is still immensely good fun though. I was kicking some skinny dragon’s ‘ed in when an absolute unit rocked up and started beating us both up. I was fighting some raptor looking thing and managed to stun lock him in a giant flower trap thing and just crushed his fucking skull like flour. Then I was fighting a dinosaur with a head built like a brick when a dragon rocks up, grabs the dinosaur’s neck and lobs him off a cliff.

The combat is lovely and meaty. The weapons feel great to use. The monsters look fucking brilliant. The fights are lengthy and punishing. Basically, it’s great.

The MP is fiddly since to play with friends you’ve got to be at the same level. The campaign is fun though: it’s actually got a story which is nice; I’ve always thought these games were storyless. Shows how much I know. And yet I’m, like, 20 odd missions in and then suddenly the story slows to a fucking full stop as you suddenly have to search every single fucking level for randomly placed tracks on the map. So you just go running about pressing the B button avoiding the locals. It’s really fucking boring. I’d finished all the campaign missions and optional missions available and now all I’m doing is nobbing around looking for invisible tracks to materialise. Just let me smack things in the face, for fucks sake. That’s all I’m here for.

Man, this game is cool as fuck sometimes.

I’m fighting this dodo then some dinoallegator rocks up and nicks my bird. THEN HE BEATS ME WITH IT.