So, any first impressions? Performance seems to be pretty bad on the regular PS4? How's the gameplay? Difficulty? Level design? Scoutflies as annoying as they seem to be? Dumbed down shit for casul retards or legit Monster Hunter? :p
Well after spending nearly 12 hours with it and playing it still with friends and alone.
This is real Monster Hunter 2 we never got. It feels like entirely new game while all other previous games like Monster Hunter 3 or 4 were just slight upgrades or spinoffs. It feels new, it feels fresh, it doesn't look like garbage anymore, old monsters have changed A LOT, you play game differently. At core of the game it is monster hunter but at the same time it is different monster hunter than before.
HOW GAME CHANGED COMPARED TO PREVIOUS MH GAMES
First of all is general design of game. This is no longer cage fight. All other previous MH games compared to MHW feels like fighting in cage. You have one monster to hunt, set amount of items and outside of special quests nothing really changes. You follow monster to area 1 (in which monster always will be after start of the quest), after while he moves to area 2(it almost always happen to move to 2 instead of 4), you hit him hard he start limping and he goes to area 3 where you finally kill him. This is how 99% of all hunts happened in previous MH games. In MHW you follow the same rules but outcome is each time different.
So let us say i want to hunt Barroth.
Hunt 1:
I find Barroth in Area 1
I put up fight and he runs away to area 2
I fight again and he again run away to area 3
Finally he starts limping and goes to area 4 to sleep of damage where i find him and kill him
Hunt 2:
I find Barroth in Area 3 which is swamp
He then runs to area 4 but unlike before now area i occupied by Mud monster.
They start to fight and mud monster pounds barroth for a lot of damage and barroth runs away to area 5
In area 5 i find some cat helpers and once i start to ride mosnter cats spring up trap and it takes out monster for about 20 seconds where i pound him hard. He dies at the end of that 20 second trap.
Hunt 3:
This time Barroth is in area 6.
I start to fight with Barroth.
After a while fighting on some sand dune out of fucking nowhere Diablos bursts out of the ground
Hu pummels both Barroth and me (killing me) and goes back to dune with Barroth running away for life.
I find Barroth later on in swampy area
etc.
This is basically how every hunt now looks. You can't predict monster movement or what will happen. For example i tried to rage Barroth so that he will follow me to mud monster nest to get that sweet damage.
What happened later was that this time actually Barroth was the one that pummeled mud monster, mud monster run away and i had to fight Barroth in his favorite area (he puts up armor in mud).
I mean look at this insanity:
Yup this means that every monster on map can fight each other if you can make them meet with each other (they usually dwell in different areas of map and they have their own territories)
Second important part is environment. This time environment matters A LOT. Where you fight is equally important as your skill. You fight fire monster then you should get him into place with water so it won't ignite you. If he flies a lot then you should look place with tight spaces. If monster loves mud then you should naturally get him out of that map. And the list goes on. Each part of map is different and offers opportunities. One can be very vertical so you can easily hop onto monster and ride it. Other one can have a lot of paratoads so you can easily paralize monster, another area can have a lot of healing bugs so in case of high damage you can just heal yourself quickly without using items, one area has dame and you can break it and flush monster from high ground to lower part of map and so on, after playing 12 hours i am yet to completely finish exploring and remembering every little thing that can help on hunt.
MONSTER DESIGN
Huge change for me. Monsters now a are much more agressive, they string combos much more quickly, they follow you around not giving you chance to properly find safe space to heal up, sharpen weapons etc. They also feel much more animal than before. They all have their own territories and they don't attack you at first glance (most of them that is). Great Jagras will just ignore you if you don't do anything against it, Diablos also will don't care about you for a long time.
On other hand AjanTrexwhateverhisanameis is agressive and will hunt you down on sight.
Like i said above they have their own territories, things they hunt and eat etc. This also means there is food chain. and if you make monsters cross each other territories they will fight with eatch other. While some monsters are strong that other, it doesn't mean that 100% of the time some monster will win against other. I found for example Barroth fighting mud monster. Overall mud monster usually has upper hand but occasionally Barroth would pummel that monster.
So this time you can use their animal nature to hunt them. Like wait for Great Jagras to eat somethingand then attack him because it will be slow and squishy after eathing something. Or you can douse meat with paralisis and ship it to AjaTrexwhateverishisname so he can gouble it up and get nice start ot the fight.
They feel like animals rather than enemies.
WEAPONS, STATS, ARMORS ETC.
As for numerical warfare stats etc. I can't really say anything about it. BETA stats of armor and weapons etc are worthless to paint picture on. From what i see you even have hidden skills activated regardless of which armors you use, outright max health and max stamina and eating food does almost nothing. Stamina never goes down etc. This is basically public demo they play at trade shows so i am guessing they give OP characters and gears so that show people can kill something and get the game.
Weapons themselves changed a bit and a lot at the same time. They look similar but their movesets are now fantastic and took huge inspiration from Monster Hunter Gen styles.
Dual Blades which i never liked because despite nimbleness in name were very stationary and clunky to use now are fucking amazing and they flow like water.
Bowguns which were superclunky to use before now are joy to use without being completely overpowered and you still can cart easily due to monster aggression changes.
Heavy bowgun and light bowgun now feels completely different. In previous games they were kind of meh and mostly worked the same aside from slight differences. Now Heavy bowgun feels like you are driving tank while light bowgun feels like you are running away and hitting shit nimble as fuck.
Gun-lance got some sweet special attack where you can leave empty bullet cartrige in beast and explode it.
Hunting horn can stack multiple songs and you can fire up 2nd and 3rd if you have time and will.
Charge blade got some sweet attacks dodges and overall damage from sword mode got boost so you have reason to use it in sword and shield mode more.
Switch axe is less clunky to use and to start infinite combo you just need to tap circle twice instead of doing janky combo. So that is reason to actually use first form instead second one non stop.
Sword&Shield are way more nimble now and you can basically attack in any direction at any time. Like attack in front and second attack at the back. You can also now launch yourself up off monster into air with one combo
Dual Blades are almost completely different in how you play them. They are by far the most movement oriented weapon now unlike before and frankly great fun to play now (instead of eariler "meh")
Lance got some changes but overall it is one of few weapons which didn't change much. Biggest change imo is that charge attack now have 2 levels instead of 1 level of power. So before in mh games you can run up charge attack and after a while you got power up and then hit monster. This time if your charge is long enough your charge attack can power up twice which does a lot of damage.
Armors got huge changes.
1. Division between blademaster and gunner i gone YAY ! No more making same armor twice.
2. Each armor piece gives you skill. And you no longer need to hit 10 or -10 to activate skill. Those skills are way less than before but they give you reason to stack those skills. Like Attack Power skill lvl1 gives you only 1 damage while lvl 5 gives you 15 damage + 3% affinity.
Outside of that we can't really use BETA for armor stats etc and how it will look in full game. All armors have same armor value which should be "fixed" in full version and we don't know if those armors give you those abilities or they are just for demo. Like i mentioned you also get hidden abilities that game doesn't tell you about and you can't switch off in BETA.
CASUL CHANGES
As for "casual" changes. So far i love them all. Like how bowguns changed. You no longer need to completely stop to fire. This sound bad but this time monster don't fuck around and can string attacks one after another and don't wait for you. Wheatstone is infinite but i don't know anyone who will miss whetstone not being infinite.
Heal potions biggest change. You can move while you are using those. HUGE change for sure. But this time you don't get health instantly and monsters are much more aggressive and you can't just run away and health yourself safely in other area as monsters follow you around especially when enraged. Also retarded flex after finishing potion is gone. Overall it takes about same time to drink them but you can move. There are other changes as well but imo most of those are QoL rather than dumbing down for casuls. Like ability to change gear in your camp at will or lack of gunner/blademaster armor distinction which i always found shit to begin with.
Camera is no longer pain in ass to use.
I tried to hunt with friend Diablos. It carted us about 4-5 times before time run out. And that is all with all above changes. So in normal game we would fail quest (BETA has 9 carts where normal game will have 3 carts per quest) and that is in less than 20 minutes with mostly OP gear (enraged Diablos charges almost instantly and takes 4/5 of health)
This was also the hunt where i appreciated new approach to game design. I old games you could not change where you fight it. Now it is possible. So for example you can make him follow you while enraged to swampy area and he would no longer be able to hide in sand, or to tight space so he wouldn't use a lot charge attacks which is his main damage dealer.
Other changes:
- Gathering is not annoying as before and much more useful. If you get scatternut now you can use it as ammo to your slinger and you get it to yoru item box later. Instead of getting 1 herb each time you get something like 2-3 at the same time and it is done in like half a second. Mining does take each swing to get 1 ore still but it is much faster.
- To find various bugs like Godbug etc. You need to actually find those bugs. Once you find those bugs which have 3d model and all look different they will be placed on map so you can find them easily next time.
- You can change audio to Monster Hunter Language instead of English or French or something like that. Characters then will talk in gibberish like previous MH games.
- Cats are more support rather than damage and monsters don't target them as often as before. Those cats will often support you in ways like healing you with environmental bugs where they find bug get close to you and pop it up to heal you, use staternuts, ride monsters, talk with other cats to spring traps or get more cats to hunt with you.
GRAPHICS AND PERFORMANCE
Performance imho is like MH4U on n3ds. It is 30+ sometimes hitting 60fps. Most of the time imo 40-45fps. There are some occasional hitches to something like 10 fps or less but those happen only when game loads another hunter at start of the quest (in multiplayer). Outside of that it is smooth sailing. I also read a lot of comments about FPS problems but it looks like very a lot between people and frankly speaking idk what is going on. Maybe console or game has build in scaler that is borked or maybe some consoles heat up a lot and those consoles downscale clocks of GPU or CPU. Either way i my case framerate is like MH4U on N3DS
TLDR:
This is real Monster Hunter 2 for us veterans and due to QoL changes newbs should find it amazing too.
Fucking awesome game really and if BETA is that good i can't fucking wait for full version.
Beta gives you ability to hunt 3 monsters but you can actually hunt 6 big monsters.
edit: updated impressions
edit: added monsters part