Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro
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A place to prototype out all the complaints I have for the Steam review I plan to write later.
- Inaccessible to new players
a) Apparently it has more tutorials than previous games in the series, where you define "tutorial" to mean "gigantic paragraphs of text" and not tutorials. Beyond the first 30 minutes of the game, there is virtually no contextual help. (Well, every so often "Handler" will come on your radio (??? It's never explained in-universe how she's talking to you from a mile away) and say something. But it's very rare, and only in story missions. If you get caught on fire from a Anjanath but you aren't playing the story mission, good luck trying to figure out how to put the fire out. Handler won't tell you.)
b) Several important abilities (for example, mounting a monster) aren't explained to the user at all. Even at hunter level 4, which is where I stopped playing. Subdueing a monster to capture it might be discoverable, except you need 1 trap and 2 tranq bombs/bullets, and there's no way to figure that out. (If the user reasonably uses 1 of each, or if he reasonably uses 2 sleep bombs/bullets instead of tranq bombs/bullets, nothing happens and he'd probably think he was on the wrong track entirely even though he's SO close.)
c) All of the UI is confusing. The inventory UI is confusing. The crafting UI is confusing. Sometimes the D pad moves between panes, sometimes it's RT with no rhyme or reason. Everything takes too many clicks. If you want to shoot a flare, you have to navigate like 5 menus to do it while a T-Rex is chewing your leg off. If you want to add someone to your friends list you can't just point at them and hold Y or something simple, you have to dive through another 5 menus and "exchange a guild card" (which I foolishly thought had to do with creating a guild not adding to the friends list.) (BTW people on your Steam friends list who play the game aren't automatically on your in-game friends list, why? Presumably that applies to Xbox Live and PSN friends lists too.) - Bad controls
a) Controller had two "modes", which is fine, but the designers of the two modes never actually talked to each other. Y switches from Exploration to Combat mode, but once in combat mode, Y reloads your gun (unless you're in the air, then it does a melee attack). Both modes have a way to move faster-- Exploration has run, and Combat has dodge roll. In Exploration mode, this RB, in Combat mode it's inexplicably A. If you hit RB in Combat mode, because you have a weak human mushy brain that has trouble rote-memorizing game controls, you actually STOP MOVING AND SLOWLY PUT AWAY YOUR WEAPON. Which is the exact opposite of "move faster". - Bad design
a) The everything.
b) Ok not quite everything but holy shit is there some bad design in this game. Why do I, at level 4, have to grind a monster with a 12% drop rate to build that monster's armor? Why does he drop every mat except the one I need, so that the crafting system is completely demented? (Each item takes like 4-5 items to craft, but all but one of them is common as dirt. Huh? Why!?)
c) Why is the open world a separate thing from the quest world? Why can't I just jump-in, jump-out of quests like the Far Cry series, the STALKER series, etc? (If I have a quest to kill Anjanath, and I'm in open world mode and I kill Anjanath, why isn't my quest complete? Even if I didn't leave camp with the intention of killing Anjanath, I still did the thing I was supposed to be doing!)
d) Content gated behind boring stupid story missions which suck. (Unfortunately a trait shared by the Far Cry games.) But why? If I don't want to do the story missions, why not let me skip them and do whatever? But in this game your hunter level is tied to story missions, and you can't do new areas/monsters without raising your hunter level. Shit.
e) The retrieve the eggs mission which is literally impossible to complete without a piece of equipment the game gives you no clue even exists until you complain to someone about the mission being impossible and they tell you "try to craft something with X trait" and then the mission's trivially easy.
f) Stunlocks. This 2018 game has stunlocks. You know the kind you'd experience in Sonic '06 or other decades-old legendarily awful games. - Multiplayer
a) Joining a game in multiplayer is demented. There's a game "session" but people in the "session" don't automatically join your missions. They can be in your session and just doing their own things. They can only join your actual game (aka you see them on the screen) when you first start a mission. Except for story missions, which they can't join at all unless you fire a flare. (Which ignores session privacy settings and brings racists into your game-- yes seriously, this happened to me). Except for the second time you do the story mission, in which case they can join from the start and no flare is required. Huh!?
b) No jump-in, jump-out multiplayer like Borderlands. Players HAVE to join a mission when it starts. If they miss it they can hang around in your session and just do their own things. If they do their own thing and travel to the mission location, they won't see the people doing the mission because I guess people on missions are ghosts or...? (Note: the game has the code required to support it, because emergency flares do exactly that, insert people into a mission already started. It just doesn't let your own friends do that; only random racists.)
c) Respawn tickets in multiplayer are PER-PARTY, not per-person. This means a dick can join your game, die a lot and cause you to fail your mission even if nobody else died, even if he was just some random asshole. - General bugs/quirks/annoyances
a) Hitting "quit" and being told by the game "you can't quit". Seriously? Fuck you, game, you don't get to tell me that. (Bonus WTF here: the Xbox One has a port of this game, and on the Xbox One applications can't disable the "quit" functionality-- it's controlled by the OS and it, AFAICT, kills the app immediately. So it's not like they don't need to cope with arbitrary quitting on another platform. They were just too fucking lazy to port that solution to PC also.)
b) Palicos disappear if more than 2 people are in a game. Very annoying if you use your Palico as your main healing mechanic
c) The monsters aren't really monsters, they're just animals. You kind of feel like a dick for killing them for basically no reason. It's like "Manifest Destiny: The Game".
d) When you get enough evidence to track something, the game YANKS the camera out of your hands
e) Japanese game so ludicrously large weapons for no reason whatever
f) You can change the text on the voicebind communication keys. Sounds like a good feature, right? Until the first PUG I played with had all of his customized with racial slurs.
g) Clipping errors up the wazzoo. Expect Anjanath to clip through trees. Expect Barroth to do his mud-swimming animation inside a solid rock. Expect all of your ridiculously large anime weapons to clip through every object on the ground. Immersion? What's that?
@e4tmyl33t said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
@blakeyrat You should include the "constantly spams your friends list with notifications that you're playing the game" issue as well.
Good:
- Character creator! With lots of options! And the default female is actually a dark-skinned African woman! ... are we sure a Japanese developer made this!?
- Palicos are awesome
- In general a lot of cute touches. The cooking animations. The random pig who hangs around the camp and you can change his clothes or pet him.
- Graphics and monster designs are pretty well done. (My favorite monster is Tobi, who's like a blue snake/lizard/flying money with electrical attacks. Which the game describes as "him rubbing his fur to create static electricity" but the model in game obviously has no fur.)
Etc more to come.
- Inaccessible to new players
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@blakeyrat You should include the "constantly spams your friends list with notifications that you're playing the game" issue as well.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
@blakeyrat You should include the "constantly spams your friends list with notifications that you're playing the game" issue as well.
Oh good one! That was happening to me yesterday so hardcore that my friend set himself to invisible just because he was getting sick of me complaining about it, haha.
Another Good point: it does support the standard Steam join game/friends features, but only kind of because even when in your session people aren't necessarily in your game. (Which, like I posted above, is demented.)
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@blakeyrat I happened to notice it happen when you started playing it for a little bit before I launched World of Warcraft, which thankfully seemed to hide them for however much longer they may have continued.
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@blakeyrat Not sure if you've ever hunted large animals with an oversize weapon, but that's what naturally happens: if you aren't thinking about it and you try to run away, you stop and slowly put away your weapon. Kinda like the mammalian diving reflex. We suck.
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I agree with all of the above. I saw you playing it, and was just waiting for you to start this topic.
The last thing I did was kill a monster with a giant stone triangle on its forehead. At the start, this fight was almost fun: I could slide around on sand dunes and get on the thing's back to stab it. Then it ran away into a swamp, which was terrible. It also had, apparently, very hard skin, which could only be damaged if your weapon's sharpness is in the green: any lower and it bounces off and becomes less sharp. Which it will always do if you hit the head. Which you will always do because it flails its head into your attacks.
Also, even with a sword and shield, which have really fast attack animations (in Monster Hunter terms; they're horribly slow still) you can't cancel any animations into blocks or dodges, so you'd better know everything about every boss if you want to win. Except where in most games, something like that would be fun, in this game the boss will just leave, or go eat some other boss, so you have to spend like half an hour trying to get to its new location.
Also, as a player of Path of Exile(!) I have to complain about this game's complexity. Yes, really. Wanna be a support character? Have fun learning to do 83 combos with your infinitely large bagpipe before every fight, after eating three types of meat, drinking potions, and sharpening your weapons so you can be ready for the first 2 minutes of the fight before the boss leaves for elsewhere.
ALL your time is spent on fiddly nonsense in this game.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
@blakeyrat You should include the "constantly spams your friends list with notifications that you're playing the game" issue as well.
Yeah and don't forget to mention that this game has STUNLOCKS. In 2018. STUNLOCKS! GIven the demented attitude of the developers of this game, I'm not even sure they consider those stunlocks a bug or not.
I died twice to being stunlocked. Un-fucking-believable. Which reminds me of another issue... respawn tickets, adding to FP.
Also once Anjanath's AI just kind of flaked out and he kind of sat around and then the combat music ended and that was a weird bug, but it only happened once so it might have been a quirk. (When he started attacking again, the combat music didn't come back so it was a little surreal.)
I also got stuck in vines once and couldn't move but i'm 99% sure that was just a bug that didn't get caught.
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@Magus said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
The last thing I did was kill a monster with a giant stone triangle on its forehead.
Do you mean Barroth with the tooth on his forehead? At least I called it a tooth. He was my least favorite monster design, looks like ass.
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A note about weapons:
Wow, they have a lot of weapons! And they all have like a hundred variants, that make them do slightly different kinds of damage!
Except they're usually bad.
I started an arena match, because the quest thing wanted me to, and it makes me change my weapon to one it thinks I should use, so I pick hammer, since who doesn't like hammers? Turns out I chose wrong. Hammers attack at like 1/10 the speed that any enemy in the game moves, and specialize in hitting things in the head, which is primarily a matter of luck, since their heads flail wildly about. It also has an incredibly short range, and guess what? No animation canceling, so if halfway through your swing, the boss plays its fourth animation and decides to jump in the air and pounce on you, you'll only reach 3/4 of your swing before you're on the ground.
So I decided, maybe next time I'll try a ranged weapon. Don't want to overlap with my friend who is enjoying the bow, so I'll try out this 'heavy bow gun' - which turned out to be a rocket launcher. I can't figure out how to get back to the training site, so I just do my next mission, and figure it out there. Wrong choice. So yeah, it's a rocket launcher that shoots 3 meters and does half the damage of the weakest dagger and shield, slower. It's whole thing is that it has lots of types of ammo! You start with like 15 varieties, which you can use 1/10 of the ammo of one of before your gun has to slowly cool down, while you use the normal bad rockets.
SO. MUCH. FUN.
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@blakeyrat Precisely.
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@Magus Among quantized choices. To a single and only digit of precision.
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@Magus I refuse to use melee weapons in a game with "hunter" in the title, so I found the Light Bowgun is the best ranged option.
The Heavy Bowgun isn't bad, but it has the really slooooow animations you're complaining about (it takes roughly 37 minutes to reload the clip). But it has an alternative fire machine gun mode which does TONS of DPS, as long as you are in a place where you can go 7-10 seconds without having to move or dodge.
The bow itself is ok but I was too stupid to figure out how "coatings" worked, so it became useless pretty quickly for me. Ammo I get. "Coatings" I have no clue. Did I mention everything in this game is confusing? If they were ok with "ammo" for the two guns, why not just have "arrows" for the bow.
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@blakeyrat said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
But it has an alternative fire machine gun mode which does TONS of DPS, as long as you are in a place where you can go 7-10 seconds without having to move or dodge.
And then you have to go back to the default fire for like 10 minutes as it recharges... Unless there's some 87th button I haven't found that unlocks ANOTHER fire mode.
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@Magus said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
And then you have to go back to the default fire for like 10 minutes as it recharges...
Well yeah. But it's a hell of a lot more useful than the Light Bowgun's alt fire which is you fucking plant the bullet into the ground as a landmine. An ability whose uselessness is matched only by its making no sense at all. "Hey guys instead of shooting this NATO 5.56 ammo at the enemy, I stuck it in the ground! Let's hope he steps in it!!!!"
Oh also the Heavy Bowgun turns into a flamethrower if you use the right ammo whose name I've forgotten.
Basically the Light Bowgun is like 50 times more practical as a weapon, but the Heavy one has way better special abilities.
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@blakeyrat Once you get into traps it'll... still seem like a pretty bad idea. I have followed this game in form of the swearing of a person playing it.
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@Gribnit said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
in form of the swearing of a person playing it.
By doing a huge marketing blitz on this game, especially on PC and Xbox platforms that haven't had any Monster Hunter games before, Capcom is basically giving their own series a terrible reputation.
If they were going to pick this game to "go mainstream", they could have spent a little time polishing it.
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@blakeyrat they did add tie-ins to other capcom games. just wait til you hunt as Ryu in, uh, the Hunting Arena.
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@blakeyrat said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
You should include the "constantly spams your friends list with notifications that you're playing the game" issue as well.
Wait, that's a thing? If you hadn't blocked me I was going to ask you if you had been repeatedly crashing or something.
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@blakeyrat said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
A place to prototype out all the complaints I have for the Steam review I plan to write later.
- Inaccessible to new players
a) Apparently it has more tutorials than previous games in the series, where you define "tutorial" to mean "gigantic paragraphs of text" and not tutorials. Beyond the first 30 minutes of the game, there is virtually no contextual help. (Well, every so often "Handler" will come on your radio (??? It's never explained in-universe how she's talking to you from a mile away) and say something. But it's very rare, and only in story missions. If you get caught on fire from a Anjanath but you aren't playing the story mission, good luck trying to figure out how to put the fire out. Handler won't tell you.)
b) Several important abilities (for example, mounting a monster) aren't explained to the user at all. Even at hunter level 4, which is where I stopped playing. Subdueing a monster to capture it might be discoverable, except you need 1 trap and 2 tranq bombs/bullets, and there's no way to figure that out. (If the user reasonably uses 1 of each, or if he reasonably uses 2 sleep bombs/bullets instead of tranq bombs/bullets, nothing happens and he'd probably think he was on the wrong track entirely even though he's SO close.)
c) All of the UI is confusing. The inventory UI is confusing. The crafting UI is confusing. Sometimes the D pad moves between panes, sometimes it's RT with no rhyme or reason. Everything takes too many clicks. If you want to shoot a flare, you have to navigate like 5 menus to do it while a T-Rex is chewing your leg off. If you want to add someone to your friends list you can't just point at them and hold Y or something simple, you have to dive through another 5 menus and "exchange a guild card" (which I foolishly thought had to do with creating a guild not adding to the friends list.) (BTW people on your Steam friends list who play the game aren't automatically on your in-game friends list, why? Presumably that applies to Xbox Live and PSN friends lists too.) - Bad controls
a) Controller had two "modes", which is fine, but the designers of the two modes never actually talked to each other. Y switches from Exploration to Combat mode, but once in combat mode, Y reloads your gun (unless you're in the air, then it does a melee attack). Both modes have a way to move faster-- Exploration has run, and Combat has dodge roll. In Exploration mode, this RB, in Combat mode it's inexplicably A. If you hit RB in Combat mode, because you have a weak human mushy brain that has trouble rote-memorizing game controls, you actually STOP MOVING AND SLOWLY PUT AWAY YOUR WEAPON. Which is the exact opposite of "move faster". - Bad design
a) The everything.
b) Ok not quite everything but holy shit is there some bad design in this game. Why do I, at level 4, have to grind a monster with a 12% drop rate to build that monster's armor? Why does he drop every mat except the one I need, so that the crafting system is completely demented? (Each item takes like 4-5 items to craft, but all but one of them is common as dirt. Huh? Why!?)
c) Why is the open world a separate thing from the quest world? Why can't I just jump-in, jump-out of quests like the Far Cry series, the STALKER series, etc? (If I have a quest to kill Anjanath, and I'm in open world mode and I kill Anjanath, why isn't my quest complete? Even if I didn't leave camp with the intention of killing Anjanath, I still did the thing I was supposed to be doing!)
d) Content gated behind boring stupid story missions which suck. (Unfortunately a trait shared by the Far Cry games.) But why? If I don't want to do the story missions, why not let me skip them and do whatever? But in this game your hunter level is tied to story missions, and you can't do new areas/monsters without raising your hunter level. Shit.
e) The retrieve the eggs mission which is literally impossible to complete without a piece of equipment the game gives you no clue even exists until you complain to someone about the mission being impossible and they tell you "try to craft something with X trait" and then the mission's trivially easy.
f) Stunlocks. This 2018 game has stunlocks. You know the kind you'd experience in Sonic '06 or other decades-old legendarily awful games. - Multiplayer
a) Joining a game in multiplayer is demented. There's a game "session" but people in the "session" don't automatically join your missions. They can be in your session and just doing their own things. They can only join your actual game (aka you see them on the screen) when you first start a mission. Except for story missions, which they can't join at all unless you fire a flare. (Which ignores session privacy settings and brings racists into your game-- yes seriously, this happened to me). Except for the second time you do the story mission, in which case they can join from the start and no flare is required. Huh!?
b) No jump-in, jump-out multiplayer like Borderlands. Players HAVE to join a mission when it starts. If they miss it they can hang around in your session and just do their own things. If they do their own thing and travel to the mission location, they won't see the people doing the mission because I guess people on missions are ghosts or...? (Note: the game has the code required to support it, because emergency flares do exactly that, insert people into a mission already started. It just doesn't let your own friends do that; only random racists.)
c) Respawn tickets in multiplayer are PER-PARTY, not per-person. This means a dick can join your game, die a lot and cause you to fail your mission even if nobody else died, even if he was just some random asshole. - General bugs/quirks/annoyances
a) Hitting "quit" and being told by the game "you can't quit". Seriously? Fuck you, game, you don't get to tell me that. (Bonus WTF here: the Xbox One has a port of this game, and on the Xbox One applications can't disable the "quit" functionality-- it's controlled by the OS and it, AFAICT, kills the app immediately. So it's not like they don't need to cope with arbitrary quitting on another platform. They were just too fucking lazy to port that solution to PC also.)
b) Palicos disappear if more than 2 people are in a game. Very annoying if you use your Palico as your main healing mechanic
c) The monsters aren't really monsters, they're just animals. You kind of feel like a dick for killing them for basically no reason. It's like "Manifest Destiny: The Game".
d) When you get enough evidence to track something, the game YANKS the camera out of your hands
e) Japanese game so ludicrously large weapons for no reason whatever
f) You can change the text on the voicebind communication keys. Sounds like a good feature, right? Until the first PUG I played with had all of his customized with racial slurs.
g) Clipping errors up the wazzoo. Expect Anjanath to clip through trees. Expect Barroth to do his mud-swimming animation inside a solid rock. Expect all of your ridiculously large anime weapons to clip through every object on the ground. Immersion? What's that?
@e4tmyl33t said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
@blakeyrat You should include the "constantly spams your friends list with notifications that you're playing the game" issue as well.
Good:
- Character creator! With lots of options! And the default female is actually a dark-skinned African woman! ... are we sure a Japanese developer made this!?
- Palicos are awesome
- In general a lot of cute touches. The cooking animations. The random pig who hangs around the camp and you can change his clothes or pet him.
- Graphics and monster designs are pretty well done. (My favorite monster is Tobi, who's like a blue snake/lizard/flying money with electrical attacks. Which the game describes as "him rubbing his fur to create static electricity" but the model in game obviously has no fur.)
Etc more to come.
- Inaccessible to new players
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@pie_flavor said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
@blakeyrat said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
You should include the "constantly spams your friends list with notifications that you're playing the game" issue as well.
Wait, that's a thing? If you hadn't blocked me I was going to ask you if you had been repeatedly crashing or something.
Yep, it's a known issue with the game. Something it does with its online interaction causes it to trigger the Steam notification that you're playing it repeatedly.
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@e4tmyl33t Many many (many) Steam games do this. Craft The World seems to do this for instance, I don't play it but I sure know when anyone else does.
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@blakeyrat It's worse than that. People who have been playing the series for years like that stuff.
@e4tmyl33t said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
Yep, it's a known issue with the game. Something it does with its online interaction causes it to trigger the Steam notification that you're playing it repeatedly.
Sure, we'll call it a 'bug' - totally not the intentions of the devs to flash the game's name on the users' friends' screens as often as possible. Nope, noooope!
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@e4tmyl33t said in Monster Hunter World is a bad game come at me bro:
@blakeyrat You should include the "constantly spams your friends list with notifications that you're playing the game" issue as well.
I was wondering about that; I thought the game must be crashing every 5 minutes or something.
