The first hour is a mess of tutorial messages and handholding, which is par for the course for the series I guess but it’s not been a whole load of fun so far. It does seem to be opening up a bit now. I at least have a handle on where stuff is in the village…
Looks absolutely spectacular for a Switch game though and I’m having fun trying out the Hunting Horn for a change. I have no doubt this is going to be great.
The tutorial stuff is absolutely obnoxious and by far the worst part of the game currently…but it'll end eventually. I guess they're taking absolutely no chances for newcomers on a non World MH this time, but I guess to people who've played the series since the start it's all mostly self explanatory stuff mixed in with some new although they didn't have to rapid fire them at you like a machinegun quite so much
I will shout out the Wirebug once again, they've made the boring as fuck gathering missions from previous games as excuses to explore the map's verticality on the bug, not to mention they mark everything on the map now. Maps are great, I knew the one in the beta was good, but the Ice one really impressed me, it basically had to compete with the one Iceborne which had incredible snow effects and while it doesn't have those it doesn't feel like a poor man's version either.
I just did the first 'Rampage' event, which was sort of a tower defense/siege game and I thought it was a lot of fun and will potentially be expotentially more fun in multiplayer.
co-op hunting can't be beaten
Good this, innit? Been doing a mixture of Village and Hub stuff and I feel like I'm getting to grips with it again now. Really liking that they've brought the SOS flares ("Join Requests") over from World, it makes multiplayer so much less daunting and it's also great (/about damn time) that Key Quests count for everyone rather than just the person who initiated them.
How are you using the Wirebug, Alastor? I feel I'm not making the best use of it somehow, maybe I need to watch some videos or something. I'm using my ZL+X and ZL+A attacks in combat, they're pretty good. I'm using it to climb cliffs (ZL to aim then ZR to go, plus the R button to wall run). Occasionally I'll use ZL+ZR in combat to zip directly above a monster then come crashing down on it. Are there any other specific uses I should be making of this? I bet you've been pulling off insane anime moves for days.
Also, the amount I use my Wirebug attacks doesn't seem to have any impact on when I can ride the monsters. I'm sure the tutorial suggested that the Wirebug attacks would progressively tangle the creature up, making it easier to ride, but it seems random - sometimes I'll come across a second monster and find myself able to ride it almost straight away. What am I missing?
I'm still making my way through Iceborne, so I haven't started yet, but every time I hit a slightly painful monster (read: I don't kill it first time solo) I'm tempted to just drop it and move onto Rise before the hype/player base dies down/leaves me behind…
I finally reached High Rank just by spanning SOS flares and getting Monster Hunter chads to one shot tricky monsters.
I'm still not convinced that World is as good as everyone says it is. I moved from bowgun to dual blades and the combat is better, but still underwhelming. Flailing in an unstoppable animation while the monster is already 50m away gets old quite fast. The GCSE drama acting when stunned also gets on my wick. But it is a fun, low stress multiplayer experience. I think the general consensus in our play group is just to keep ploughing through World and Icebourne and then move to Rise when it's ported to PC next year.
Have you tried (m)any of the others? I didn’t really get on with the Dual Blades, for similar reasons (though it might be doing the Arena Quest for Azure Rathalos that really put me off), but they are one of the weapons I’m semi-acceptable with, I’m just not that big a fan. I also can’t be bothered with the ranged weapons at all.
I’ve done by far the most quests with the Greatsword (hit and run play style, slow swings, and the big damage numbers) but it’s not been great for some of the (generally faster) Iceborne monsters, so I’ve also been playing a bit of Lance (tanky precision counterpuncher) and Insect Glaive (for meeting flying monsters in the air) too, and each offer a really different way of playing when you really get into them.
(I’m seriously considering trying Sword & Shield again as well, because apparently I have commitment issues.)
I have dabbled in some of the others. The really slow ones were just too slow. I might review again as I though Dual Blades would be snappier and more reactive than they are.
Nothing in Monster Hunter is snappy and reactive, Dual Blades are an order of magnitude faster than most of the roster. I use them as a backup occasionally but I’m definitely a Hammer player at heart.
Bow might be worth a try, at least you could pretend it’s an FPS? JDub’s suggestions are good too, Insect Glaive in particular is so odd that it might appeal.
There's already an Insect main, I'd just get shouted at.
Charge Blade then. No-one understands how the fuck that works, everyone will assume you’re some kind of savant just for showing up with one.
Just a warning for people wanting to play Bow, it's damage output can be super weak if you're not playing it properly, it's not like old gen Bow where you charged well placed shots it's more spammy and dodgy. (preferred old style, but this is okay). If you find it fun to play it letting go off well aimed power shots that fine too if it's more fun for you.
Dual Blades can be non-committal, just don't fall into the Demon Dance trap like most people do and spam it thinking it's the best move to use 9/10
[laughs nervously]
It's notable with Rise just how little actual Monster Hunting there is left in the series now. It's more Monster Fighter than anything really.
Used to be you'd actually have to scour the map for your prey, hit it with a paintball to keep it visible on the map, flag it up for other players, make sure you'd come prepared with whetstones, pickaxes etc so you could top up on materials as you went, bring your hot and cold drinks for environmental protection etc etc. You'd end up chasing the thing round the map as it kept running away, you really felt like you were wearing it down over time.
World streamlined a lot of that but introduced scoutflies so it at least felt like you were tracking the monsters still. That rhythm of attack/heal/chase remained.
Rise basically goes "fuck it", marks the monster on your map from the start, gives you a dog to ride so you're the fastest thing in the game, lets you heal and sharpen your weapon while running full speed on aforesaid dog, lets you gather all items from a node with a single action, removes hot and cold drinks completely, and THEN turns you into Spider-Man.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but they've removed a lot of stuff from these games over the years. I do kind of miss the MH3U feeling of being the smallest, squishiest thing on the map, and having to really prepare for a hunt - now you grab your potions and you're smashing monster faces within minutes. On the other hand, this is fast, accessible and fun. Swings and roundabouts I guess.
Speaking of preparing for hunts, I've been playing World for ten hours or so and still don't have the first idea what's going on. So far I've gotten by, simply by mashing triangle on the story monsters. But once I made it to the third area (choral something) I decided to start playing the game properly.
I've been tasked with finding a paolumu, so instead of running straight at it I went on a couple of expeditions. Found tracks. Found the monster itself. Got bored and started twatting it with triangle. Found more tracks. But it wasn't showing up in my monster guide, so I still don't know its weaknesses for the 'proper' hunt.
I went back to the old rat thing on the books, and this is my screen:
I do think I'm enjoying myself. But it's the most obtuse thing I've ever played.
It's been long enough since I played MHW that I can't remember any of that stuff, but it's definitely to do with the footprints and other tracks that you've found. Honestly I don't think any of this stuff is actually critical, but there's bound to be a guide out there somewhere. JDub is playing MHW at the moment, he's probably better placed to help you.
If you're just twatting things with triangle, though, you're doing it wrong. Each weapon has quite a range of different moves and combos you can use and it's worth trying several weapons to work out what's best for you. Look in the Hunter's Notes in the menu for weapons guides, then try them out in the training area you can access from your room.
Absolutely my experience MPH - but I play with people who have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game and thankfully I'm spoilt as I just ask a stream of "what the fuck is this" questions and get them answered immediately. I often wonder how I was supposed to work that out for myself from the UI, which is willfully bizarre.
I thin the elephant monster in the room hunt is that the game is largely layers and layers of obtuse mechanics which all essentially boil down to twatting a monster with triangle (and circle).
It reminds me a bit of people who appreciate wine. I think there's a huge amount you can take from MH if you dig into it and appreciate the smoky hints of Appalachian oak, but I'm more of a Tesco 3.99 generic plonk sort of bloke.
I've played 250 hours of MHW and Iceborne, and I'm not sure I'd ever even noticed the green bar. I mainly look at the other section when I visit the "rat bloke" (who I'm now calling Roland), so that I can see the weaknesses, etc, but even so.
I do generally collect any evidence, footprints, etc, whenever I see any (which I'm pretty sure I'd only ever noticed increase the orange bar), and that's meant I never really (have to) worry about it all, but I am now genuinely fascinated as to what the green bar is…
Oh, and yeah, as Gar says, the combat isn't exactly Devil May Cry, but you will enjoy it a lot more when you learn some of the details. At least two of the weapons I use you could probably get away with just spamming triangle, at least for a bit in the early game, but eventually learning some of the other stuff really helps - increasingly I know what moves I can roll (or cancel) out of, and how and when I need to do that with some of the slower moves/weapons (especially against the quicker monsters), and so on.
Absolutely my experience MPH - but I play with people who have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game and thankfully I'm spoilt as I just ask a stream of "what the fuck is this" questions and get them answered immediately. I often wonder how I was supposed to work that out for myself from the UI, which is willfully bizarre.
They keep trying to improve the new player experience and somehow making it worse. Rise is particularly atrocious at this, a seemingly never-ending succession of context-free text box popups teaching you mechanics you won't be using for hours. It spends ages telling you how to use the in-game camera, for instance, then forgets to tell you how to drink potions.
The mechanics in these games are mostly fine but they urgently need to put a couple of proper tutorials in there - one teaching you how to twat monsters properly, and one teaching you all the other weird bits of the UI. Even having played several of these games before, I still spent the first couple of hours of Rise in a state of abject confusion, and now a few days in there's still a whole bunch of stuff I've mentally filed away as "I'll work that out later when I need it".
The problem here, as with any complicated system that requires explanation, is that the tutorials/guides/other tips are written by the people who made it in the first place. As such, what they think is good at explaining stuff usually isn't… you end up only making sense to those who already have an idea.
Idiot guides in these games should be an option. In everything, in fact. Otherwise, it's like trying to decipher an encyclopedia written in 3pt Arabic font.
It's been a while since I've played World now but if you get tracks for the same monster and check in on rat boi eventually it'll fill and you shouldn't even need to hunt for it on the map, it'll show up automatically iirc. As for weaknesses, it doesn't seem much but finding out Rathalos is weakest to Thunder letting you make a set and weapon with thunder attack will make it easier, for example. Or finding out that a Monster completely resists the fire dual blades you're currently using is good to know, as well as where a monster is weakest.
Things get even better in Rise, we not only find out what zones are weak we get actual numbers so we can see which part is weakest to what.
Yeah.
Or just SOS flare for a hench level 200 to come and do it for you.
Games journalism 2021:
Author loads up a Monster Hunter game for the first time ever. Skips past all the tutorials, jumps straight into multiplayer with no idea of how the game works, complains the monsters have no health bar, predictably gets battered, moans about the controls, is angry that the monster doesn't die when he's hit it three times, and gets paid to write an article about how inaccessible the series is. Finishes said article by saying "this game looks good, maybe I'll give the tutorials a try".
Kotaku and IGN both aren't worth the digital paper they're printed on.
I think it's the overall theme of "I can't cope with this, it's not the same as the stuff I usually play" that annoys me the most. Even down to complaining that the attack button is different, and expecting to just be able to jump into a game and button-mash and be rewarded with instant success.
What happened to actually trying something new every once in a while? What a sad approach, especially for a so-called professional. And Rise is significantly more accessible than most of the entries in this series, he'd never have made out of the first area in any of the pre-World MH games.
Farming a Goss Harag with the Longsword last night, just reminded to shout out all the new monsters in this, I think I like all of them. There's the Bishanten, the flying monkey squirrel thing that throws fruit at you (imagine some full force launching a watermelon at your head) and when he throws poison fruit he even covers his mouth to not breathe any of it in himself, great monster. There's the hideous Somnacanth, a…..er, weird water snake otter thing who snakes through the water on it's back and gets things from the water and bangs it on their tummy. And the aforementioned Goss Harag, a yeti who can freeze the air around his hands to make super sharp blades…or big massive ice clubs, he's so incredibly fun to fight.
Honestly don't know how they manage it generation after generation but they've never let me down. Of course the returning monsters are great too, some tweaked from World (Looking at you Rajang) and some just familiar enough that you'll see a Tigrex and know 'Oh he charges twice when not angry and three times when angry' before you've ever engaged it.
Also shout outs to the new features, wirebugs are an absolute game changer, when you know you can roll in the air after swinging it makes getting around the maps a joy in itself. I've said it before but if you go gathering for something you can really explore the map like the game was a different genre, find all the secret puppet spiders (can force a Wyvern Ride) or Blast Toad for easy knockdown when you do a real hunt. Speaking of Wyvern Riding, it fixed a huge annoyance for me in World, Monster invasion, now it's not 'oh fuck now Tigrex ishere' it's 'Fuck yes, Tigrex is here' because monsters fighting will result in the loser being open for a Wyvern Ride.
It's getting real hard to not just use Longsword on everything, what a broken weapon. Once you master it's 3 counters (you only need to mostly use one or two as well) nothing can touch you and it does so much damage.
I'm totally into this now. I… think it might be the best one. And you're right about Goss Harag, Alastor, what a brilliant fight that is.
It is also bloody great playing this in the week after release. Finding online sessions for basically any quest takes seconds.
It might be my favourite too, hard to say. I know going back without the Wirebug will be hard now, I'm too used to swing-roll-swing-roll-swing-rolling across almost entire sectors, and still finding Thunderbugs, Puppet spider and other Endemic Life hiding around the map. Even just seeing the new flagship monster in the Forest Shrine map, I was on the highest point of the map (really fucking high btw) and I could see everything, including him leaping tall bounds up some ledges.
Great thing about Goss Harag is he's amazing to fight with most weapons, as opposed to hard with one, easy with another. Since he's a brawler who can make homemade ice hammer/sword gauntlets he's just fun to trade blows with before you fight Rathalos who has been literally set to Fast Forward or something. -_-
Let me know how you find the Rampage. It's not exactly hunting Monsters and I wouldn't wanna' do it solo, but getting 3 other players and setting up cannon placements and watching 4 streams of chaingun bullets tear a Rathalos out of the sky is fun. I know I'm in the minority here, but I don't care. :)
I've done three Rampages now I think and I've got to say I'm not much of a fan - it just seems a bit random whether you win or lose. The chaos is quite appealing but I never really know what's going on. I'll do them when they come up as part of the progression but I can't say I'd ever willingly choose one. Mind you I feel the same way about all the big Monster Hunter set pieces (like Zorah Magdaros, or Jhen Mohran) so I guess it's just this instalment's version of those.
Anyway, got to High Rank now in the Hub, the multiplayer is so much fun in this. Is the Village entirely Low Rank? I've seen the credits roll but it's still going, I'm guessing I should probably finish off the solo stuff before really getting stuck into High Rank.
Yeah pretty much, I think you get High Rank on the 3rd License Test but maybe you can get if you crawled through the Hub with friends. Be warned because in Low Rank armour you might feel like you're wearing paper when you get hit. I stubbornly refused to change my LR Barioth set (Crit Draw, Fast sheathe etc) until me and a friend farmed some HR Aknosom and I made a HR Fire Katana set.
Right so I've unlocked 6-star village quests and it's no longer giving me a "number of key quests to next rank" counter and all the monsters are ones I've already fought in multiplayer.
I'm safe to sack it off and just focus on the Gathering Hub now, right?
Yes, if you want,. there's no reward for doing every quest anyway. :(
It's strangely anti-climactic, to be honest - the credits roll far too early (and way earlier than any other Monster Hunter game I've played), then it dribbles along for another couple of ranks, then it doesn't have any sort of ending.
I realised the other day I'm actually sort of happy I'm still playing Iceborne, because it means I can play that near enough as I would've anyway, then have Rise waiting, and then G Rank for that will show up quicker for me than everyone else (relatively speaking). Considering the quests I see people are still doing when I search for SOS's, it feels like there'll still be people playing World until World 2 (and beyond), so I don't expect Rise to be deserted when I get there anyway.
I do feel like I'm potentially approaching the Iceborne home straight, at least for the story, and my HR is now high enough that I've been given the "final" quest for base World. Whether I'll go all-in on the endgame for Iceborne I don't know, but it's definitely been teaching me (even moreso) how to play/build "properly" - I now have what are effectively 'Fancy' and 'Practical' builds for both the GS and Lance, and at this point am fairly sure I could just play MH indefinitely, if it came to it.
Oh man I'm all but done building a GS set in Rise and it finally feels like I'm playing the weapon. You can swap the TCS for 'Rage Slash', which sounds like absolute sacrilege but in solo play is super fucking fun because the new last hit has the same tank properties as the shoulder tackle and it gets stronger if you get hit during it even, to top it off you can swing at any angle as opposed to the locked cone you get with TCS. Basically if you think you'll never get hit ever, use TCS, if you get hit a lot, use Rage.
Alastor, you have played 85 hours of Monster Hunter Rise in just over a week. I don’t know whether to congratulate you or stage an intervention.
I booked time off for it, it would have been higher but I have acquired a mega thirst for RPGs lately!
Deeply envious of Alastor, here. I can't remember the last time I had 12 hours to myself to do anything I liked, never mind having an average of 12 hours in every day for a week.
A Twitter friend of mine is looking for some company in Rise do… something…
Anyone want to help him out? https://twitter.com/OrdoaleaP/status/1380254312815812612?s=20
If he still needs help tomorrow I can hop on, I finish my shift then. I'm the only person who likes the mode he wants to play so there's that.
Awesome.
I’d be happy to help. But he may have missed this - if you go to the board on the right of the quest giver, you can answer a random Join Request and jump into someone else’s game. So if you are struggling with a particular quest, it’s quite easy to get past it.
I'll pass it on!
Is the mythical society hunt being run? Anyone around tonight?
I should be on later
That's Monster Hunter: Rise "completed" then - inasmuch as it doesn't actually have an ending at the moment, as Covid forced them to ship it incomplete and the proper ending is coming along in an update next month. But it has lots of ranks to go through and ends with a big boss fight, so it's as complete as it's going to be for a while. No-one plays these things for the plot anyway.
I'm… conflicted about this game. On the one hand, the actual moment-to-moment gameplay is better than it's ever been. It's fast and responsive, the weapon movesets have been streamlined in all the right ways, and the extra mobility you get from the wirebugs is transformative. You can zip all over the landscape, come crashing down on a monster's head, wrap it in wire then ride it straight into a wall. It genuinely makes previous entries in the series look slow and a bit cumbersome in comparison, and the sense of empowerment is huge. It's simplicity itself to find and jump into multiplayer sessions. Even the new Rampage system, a kind of chaotic multiplayer tower defence mode, is pretty fun.
Unfortunately what they've sacrificed in order to make this happen is, well, pretty much everything else. There's almost no Hunting left in this Monster Hunter game. That feeling of being the smallest thing in the ecosystem, of having to prepare meticulously for every hunt, of needing to know your opponent's habits inside-out to stand a chance, of just hanging on in a long and arduous fight… all gone. Now the monsters are marked on the map from the beginning, you can outrun them on your dog, all four players can zip about like Spider-Man and frankly the poor beasts don't stand a chance.
And that kind of means you don't need to engage with most of the game's other systems either. I don't think I used any inventory items at all apart from potions, antidotes and traps, throughout the entire game. Because I wasn't crafting inventory items, I didn't need to use the extra methods the game gives you of gathering materials, like the Argosy or the Meowcenaries. Because monsters typically went down in less than ten minutes, I didn't need to worry about Stamina. And because the fights were typically pretty easy, I hardly even needed to worry about weapon and armour upgrades: I created one Low Rank and one High Rank armour set focusing on attack and defence, and no more than a couple of weapons, and they saw me through the entire game. Even the amount of parts you need to create gear has been significantly decreased.
So that's really the entire heart of the thing ripped out. It's just become Monster Twatter, where you pick a monster from a menu, button-mash with three other players for ten minutes, then gather your loot. Don't get me wrong, that's really fun in small doses (as I said, the moment-to-moment gameplay is great) but without all the meta stuff to support it and give you reasons to replay monsters, it gets dull pretty fast. I was actively bored during the 7-star hunts - supposedly the game's hardest challenges - just slogging through them in order to get to the final boss. Previous games in the series have never been like that. And I've pretty much rinsed the game in significantly less than half the time I've spent on other Monster Hunter games.
It's not done, at least. Today brings the first major update with several new monsters and a bunch of other additions. Maybe if it gains a much more challenging endgame over time, it'll give people a reason to engage more with the content that's already there (though I fear, like with World, it'll just become an exercise in beating the same handful of Elder Dragons over and over to get the "best" gear). I'm not sure I'll be back though, at least not until an expansion drops.
That's sold me on it more than most other stuff I've read, to be honest.
When I play World, there's always the nagging sense that I'm missing whole systems, simply because I don't have enough time to dedicate to the game. A more streamlined version sounds ideal.
Can you pause using Switch sleep mode? On World that always kicked you to the main menu, because it was constantly online.
You can definitely use sleep mode in the village, between quests, without being kicked out to the main menu. I assume the same would be the case in solo quests, but I'm not sure I ever actually tried that. There is, for the first time, a proper pause option in the menu though.
Bizarrely I can't find a single mention of the sleep mode thing online. You'd think someone else would have wondered the same thing. I'm gaming in 6-7 minute bursts at the moment, in between baby stuff. So the option to Sleep mid monster-twatting would be ideal.
To bring a different game into the thread for a second, Outriders is terrible for this. You can't even pause the game in single-player, and some of the enemy waves take a good 45 minutes to defeat. So you're committing yourself to not peeing for a significant amount of time.
I'll check it out later and let you know. I agree that being unable to pause single-player games (or cutscenes) is always a terrible design choice.