Hello. I'm Blue. I'm one of of those internet peoples. I reblog touhou and fate and sometimes other things. Sometimes I even talk about stuff. Amazing!
aside from not being a slave to optimization meta, how are you finding Wilds now that you're actually playing it?
There's a great game somewhere in there, but I am baffled by how much of Wilds's Low Rank either lacks vision, or fails to have a vision grander than "What did people like about Gen 5? Let's do more of that and less of what they didn't like"
The game runs like ass and needed 1 more year in the oven for optimization but I think everyone knows that. I want to talk about the game design.
There are two main things that stick out to me when I play Monster Hunter Wilds:
For a game that marketed itself as a sequel to MH World, Wilds sure takes way more after MH Rise's design philosophies, both for the better and the worse.
A lot of things in Wilds are blatant and heavy-handed reactions to player feedback about World.
Both of these things contribute to a game that lacks so much friction it feels smooth as baby cheeks to play and also runs headfirst into an identity crisis.
I'm a bit short on time right now so I can't go as deep as I want to, but I'll do my best.
For Point 1 - what I mean by this is that Wilds' combat is very fast, highly reactive, and dynamic, where weapons get a multitude of defensive options, more complex modular movesets, and a wider variety of builds. Lots of special skills from Rise ended up coming back, such as Rapid Morph, or Shock Absorber (THANK GOD FOR SHOCK ABSORBER FUCK NEEDING TO SLOT IN 1 LEVEL OF FLINCH-FREE TO PLAY MULTIPLAYER). Skills like Burst, Counterstrike, and Frenzy dominate the DPS meta where Weakness Exploit and Agitator were unchallenged in World, etc.
Fighting feels good. Offsets are sexy as fuck. Building feels... well the actual skill selection is way more varied than Wexploit 3 (since it was nerfed to Wexploit 5) and Agitator 5 at least, though other changes made from #2 kind of impair how good it feels to build.
However, Rise got rid of a lot of the jankiness of World that made some fans call it Monster Fighter instead of Monster Hunter, and Wilds brought all that back in full force plus more. Every Monster is instantly seen on the map without having to find them, you got a mount that speeds all the way there and lets you sharpen and heal while on them, trivializing sharpness and healing as mechanics, and new to Wilds - a grappling hook that lets you Spider-Man snatch items all around without even needing to pick them up and the ability to wield two weapons at once (where Rise let you wield two sets of movesets at once for one weapon).
If this made Rise Monster Fighter, Wilds is Monster Massacre. Just like in Rise there's no need to learn safe windows for healing or sharpening thanks to your mounts letting you do them while on the move, dual wielding weapons and letting you swap between them on the mount gives you unrivaled versatility, and all this player power means there just isn't much of a reason to build according to your target, one-size fits all.
In fact, Wilds combined Rise's problems with World's biggest problem pre-iceborne: elements are fucking worthless, physical is king. Just go all in on physical and never change your build, you are so inherently powerful that you can smash through Low Rank barely crafting anything at alll, basic armor and basic hope weapons make Guardian Arkveld and Zoh Shia feel like regular Monster Hunter fight difficulty from how absurdly strong you are.
"But if difficulty is all you're looking for, the High Rank Archtempered monsters provide a real challenge!" I don't think the difficulty (or lack thereof) itself is the problem (although I personally wish Wilds' Low Rank was harder), for me the problem is that for the entirety of Low Rank you aren't engaging with any of the systems at all and just playing the same way the entire time.
Remember Jyuratodus in Low Rank World? That fish was a pain in the ass because the intended way to fight him was to use a water weapon to wash the mud armor off its skin, and then beat it up while it was exposed (but had immunity to water.) This sucked because you could only bring one weapon at a time, so if you played in a group one guy was on mudwashing duty and the rest got to deal the damage, or if you were playing solo you had an agonizingly slow hunt (unless you knew to wash off the mud with water pods)
This is the exact sort of gimmick that Wilds could have accommodated for with its double weapon system that would have had you engaging with the idea of both weapons being a part of the same build, but no, we don't have that. Every monster in Low Rank is so painfully straightforward and honest, like they're afraid the idea of a single monster gimmick would scare off new players.
This brings me to Point 2 - the other half of Wilds is heavy-handed reactions to everything people didn't like about World instead of creating its own vision for the game.
This will get me crucified, but I don't like Alma. Alma feels a little embarrassing to me, as every aspect of her exists as a fervent apology from Capcom for how much people hated World Handler. She follows behind you. She reminds you to pick up your carves. She diligently informs you about each and every monster. She compliments you on every turn. She never gets you in trouble. They made her a cute, modest girl with large glasses that looks like she stepped right out of a Filipino hipster hangout to contrast Gemma being the sexy blonde in a skimpy outfit, all because World Handler was an unprofessional clown stuffing her face 24/7 and staying back at camp who wasn't even good-looking enough to get away with it.
Handler was so notoriously hated that she's often cited as the worst thing about World, but nothing about Alma comes off to me as anything other than "We need to make Handler appealing", and Alma's lack of any real reason to exist beyond being the opposite of Handler makes me resent her presence, and that's coming from someone who loves glasses!
I feel the same about Wilds' story mode. People said World's story was nonsense, and it was, but at least it wasn't very intrusive. Wilds' story is presented like an AAA Playstation Exclusive: Lots of cutscenes, big production values, plenty of times where you just walk and talk, plenty of running back and forth needing to learn the names of the various NPCs. If the Hunter's Guild of World acted like cavemen in how they crashlanded everywhere with airships and beat the daylights out of any creature in reach, the guild of Wilds is strictly professional, you're not even allowed to kill a monster unless the guild deems it necessary.
There's a couple of problems I have with this. The first is that while their production values went up, Monster Hunter's writing skills certainly have not, and you just get something that's every bit as nonsensical as World's story was, only more expensive. The second is oh my god I don't caaaaaaaaaaarrrreeeeeee.
Speaking as objectively as I can, I admire the amount of work that went into showing how different peoples have adapted to living in each area, with simple but distinct cultures that show a wide variety of dress, food, and village planning.
However, I do not care. At all. I bought the game called Monster Hunter to hunt monsters, why the hell am I spending several quests doing diplomatic missions for the guild that comprise multiple cutscenes? Why am I spending so much time with people?
And let's say you're in the right mindset to appreciate this new direction, it becomes obvious very quickly what happened to Wilds' story. Capcom didn't know how to make Monster Hunter have a complex plot, so they aped Final Fantasy instead.
It's a bootleg Final Fantasy! You got the multiple tribes spread out across a continent, an ancient and highly advanced civilization that fell due to their hubris, you got discount Chocobos called Seikrets, MonHun's already got airships, and the story ends up revolving around a fucking crystal! Like I was playing through Low Rank wondering how much more FF this would get, and then they made me enter a fucking hi-tech ruin colored in white and I genuinely forgot I was not playing FF16.
Why did they do that? I wasn't bothered that Rise's concept was as dumb as "Kamura is a village of ninjas that built their homes in a known migration path of monsters, and every few years the monsters migrate and smash through the town" like I'm here to do monster hunting, that sounds like the perfect excuse to fight a ton of monsters alright. I don't need any of this, I don't care who the Keepers are!
I was SO annoyed that in the fight with Zoh Shia the protagonist says "By my own order" like its a big dramatic emotional moment that she's not gonna wait for guild permission to kill an honest to god Resident Evil bioweapon. I didn't need the guild's permission for dick in World and Rise, this moment does literally nothing for me!
______
This ramble has gotten disorganized and hard to read, but the basic gist is that I think Monster Hunter needs some friction, needs some jank. Wilds feels like a game made for people that weren't going to stick around past the credits roll, instead of a game made for Monster Hunter fans.
Grinding for specific parts was friction that got smoothed out, but it was a vital part of creating the core loop that kept you hunting. It wasn't nice to find your usual plan of attack is useless on a new monster and you have to poke and prod it for 20 minutes to figure out what to do, but it gave you a wide variety of challenges that also served to give monsters their unique identities. It sucks to get hit while healing or sharpening, but studying the monster for openings to sharpen or heal also helps you learn when to safely attack the monster since it's all part of learning its moveset.
Wilds is proof to me that you can't just get rid of absolutely everything you find annoying without harming your core loop and your unique design identity. Mind you, I'm saying this as a character action fan that gets immensely frustrated when I get smacked around by moves I can't react to: even I think Wilds goes too far.
Do I hate the game? Do I think its problems are unfixable? No to both, actually. Underneath Wilds somewhere is the perfect fusion of Rise' dynamism with World's weighty, meaty physics and living worlds, and I bet that was Capcom's exact vision for Wilds too. However, I think Wilds needed something more than just "Be the best mixture of World and Rise" to serve as the foundation for its design concepts to really stand on its own (example: World was about the world, so monsters interacted with each other, the environment, simulated a food chain, etc to make a "World" while Rise was called Rise because it was based around verticality, which is why every Hunter can wallrun and wirebugs let you swing everywhere).
I think the game is slowly changing for the better (design-wise anyway, I need some optimization patches Capcom). Lagiacrus has people complaining that they dislike the underwater combat and people hate how hyperactive Seregios is, but honestly that's such a good sign to me. Seregios is annoying enough to build bleed resistance around him, Lagiacrus needs smart use of lure pods if you don't want him to drag the fight underwater where all you have is the clutch claw to defend yourself with.
I think those complaints are good signs. As long as they're not random oneshots from overstatted monsters, having unique gimmicks that you have to plan for goes a long way towards making these battles feel like titanic clashes with godlike beasts again, and not a bullying session.
I think Wilds still has the potential to turn itself around (and it will have to do so vigorously, given its Mostly Negative reception on Steam), but I think it needs to think very carefully about what the master rank expansion should be like. Make it stand on its own as its own unique spin on Monster Hunter, don't just be "What if we just did all the things people really liked about Iceborne and Sunbreak and deleted what they didn't like".
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Hi everyone! I’ve been hard at work this weekend setting up a Patreon for myself! It’d mean a lot of you follow me there, or consider supporting me!
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you know what’s really good is this new show Epithet Erased, which i’ve reblogged some stuff about before. broad description… it’s an adaptation of a friend group’s anime kitchen sink tabletop campaign, apparently, so what it boils down to is a bunch of wacky characters with strange powers squaring off against each other and getting involved in hijinks. there’s not much of a hook, but it’s just… really charming and funny. check out these character intro cards:
it’s got this kind of low-budget limited animation style, akin to sort of a puppet show with visual novel portraits, but they have a really good sense of where to put in the effort with the visuals, so it all holds together surprisingly well. excellent comedy writing and stellar voice acting just really make it work. i’m hoping it gets greenlit for a second season soon.
it’s fairly short- seven 20-minute episodes on youtube and VRV. here, check out the first episode and see how it treats you:
Apparently the crypters get something called the Sirius Light, which is like a more awesome command seal or something. Maybe it’s a deity or figure associated with the star in question?
... Not that that really narrows it down, given the amount of cultures with some mythology around the thing.
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