Monster Hunter

[jayc4life]

Played a few hours of this on PC so far. Real smooth (on a Ryzen 5 processor, GTX1070 GPU and 32GB RAM, running from an SSD). Had problems initially trying to connect to a friend on launch day, but today, was fine, we got connected, and we got a few Investigation quests done.

 

Haven't played a Monster Hunter since Freedom Unite, and so far, I've only carted once, on an expedition, because stupid me got too big for my boots and thought I could take on a Rathian with the (not quite but still) garbage pre-order armor.

 

I'm a big fan of the base having a complete and constantly upgrading guide to the monsters, weak points and element advantages, that constantly expands the more you hunt it. Granted, a lot of the time, it makes sense when you see the monster, but not once have I had to go searching a wiki for help taking down a monster.

[toxicitizen]

Alright, so I put about a dozen hours into it. After the first few hours on the first day, I really wasn't sure if it would be for me. My first proper hunt was equal parts confusing and frustrating.

 

"Wait, where's his health bar??"

"Will you quit running away you piece of shit!"

"Oh my God, is this asshole going to die before the heat death of the universe?"

 

Then last night I said fuck it, bought some beer and figured I'd give it a proper shot to find out for sure. Before I knew it, 3 hours had passed. Once I switched to a more beginner-friendly weapon, got into the proper mindset and learned to appreciate the flow and pacing of a hunt, everything fell into place and I started having a ton of fun. Taking down one of these huge bastards after tracking it and chasing it for 30mins is some of the most satisfying shit ever! The last one I did was Anjarath and finally taking down that T-Rex motherfucker after him constantly being a threat during previous hunts felt so freaking good!

 

I rewatched ProJared's review last night and some of the stuff he said made me really glad I waited this long to get into the series, though. There is an insane amount of QOL improvements here that seem like basic common sense things to have in such a game. Makes me really not want to bother ever trying to go back to previous games. Especially since even with all those improvements the game still manages to feel a bit like an impenetrable clusterfuck of menus and data overload.

[jayc4life]

Anjanath owned me pretty hard the first time out. Unfortunately, I don't know if gearing up's gonna help me much,  but I'm pretty familiar with the longsword (yes, i'm a longsword n00b, what of it), so I think I'm gonna stick with that for now. I've not been investing any of my armor spheres at all, will that make a significant difference?

 

Spent a while doing some sidequests and investigations today. Opened up another camp point on Wildspire Wastes, done a few quests to unlock more canteen items, and then, captured a live Barroth.

 

Absolutely bricked it at the end because Jyuratudos showed up as he was limping away and they started a turf war, thought Jyura was gonna cause me a mission fail. Luckily Barroth won and Jyuratudos fled, but not before Barroth broke off some materials for me. Also Diablos showed up early on and absolutely wrecked me in one hit, with a full health bar. I can't wait to mess with him later on.

 

Also, my Palico is adorable as hell, with her Rathian tiara and Jagras cape.

[toxicitizen]

4 minutes ago, jayc4life said:

Anjanath owned me pretty hard the first time out. Unfortunately, I don't know if gearing up's gonna help me much,  but I'm pretty familiar with the longsword (yes, i'm a longsword n00b, what of it), so I think I'm gonna stick with that for now. I've not been investing any of my armor spheres at all, will that make a significant difference?

 

Not gonna give you shit about your weapon choice. I switched to dual blades, which is apparently the most noob friendly, and I have no regrets.  As for armor spheres, yeah you should probably use them. Especially if monsters start one shotting you. From what I've read, you can get by early on simply by upgrading whichever armor you have. I did a bit of grinding to complete the Pukei set yesterday and I'm just upgrading that for now because everything else looks kind of ugly lol. Seems to give a decent defense boost, at the very least.

 

Barroth is the first one that truly gave me hell. I failed my first attempt and that is what made me change weapon and go back to get the Pukei set. It felt so good to not just beat him but also do an investigation today and actually capture the fucker alive.

[jayc4life]

Yeah, I'm probably either gonna get the Pukei full set, or the Barroth set, and upgrade that. At the moment I'm just using the Origin pre-order set, but with the Kestodon armguards and Gajau boots, but a full set, and the bonuses that grants, will probably help me out a ton.

[jayc4life]

Some more of my friends picked this up, and we've been having a blast with it in co-op so far. It's still frustrating having to sit in the lobby until they see the story cut-scenes before jumping in, but we live with it. We were fighting a Rathian in Expedition (Twitch archive) and Rathalos appeared to help her out against us. At some point, my friend had managed to drive Rathian back to its next, but it knocked out the makeshift dam and I'd wasted a good 10 minutes climbing this massive tree only to have to go the whole way to the bottom again.

 

But yes, very fun game in co-op. Been a go-to game for me to stream these last few days since I got back into it. Still not broke into double-digit HR yet, but immensely enjoying my time with Monster Hunter World.

 

Relatedly, has anyone picked up Generations Ultimate for Switch yet? I hear it's a lot more like the older series entries, but there's a lot more monster variety on the other hand, since it's like a "Best Of The Series" game.

[Mister Jack]

Has anyone managed to kill the Behemoth? This guy is such an absolute FUCKER and I've lost to him probably 30 times. I am truly at a loss for what to do. No other monster in the game has caused me this much trouble.

[CorgiShinobi]

Regular Behemoth: Yes

 

Extreme Behemoth: Nope

 

Unless you've got an actual squad of people you know or communicate with effectively, Extreme Behemoth will be nigh impossible. His fourth and fifth stages require coordination that's rare to build in randoms. Regular Behemoth is doable so long as everyone knows what makes Behemoth tick and to protect any comets that land from Behemoth. If you're doing Behemoth right now, I'm not sure what kind of people you're coming across. Once I had enough materials for the full armor set and weapon, I haven't touched him since.

[Mister Jack]

I usually have to play with at least one or two randoms.  There have been occasions where I had good people who knew what to do.  Unfortunately, Behemoth's stupidly high damage output ended up killing me or someone else when he gets in a lucky shot.  He's so damn aggressive and he has so much range that it can be really hard to get some breathing room to heal yourself if he decides to put you on his shit list. At least half of my deaths against this guy happen while I'm trying to drink a potion.

Edited September 26, 2018 by Mister Jack

[CorgiShinobi]

Two things that got me through Behemoth was having fully Augmented armor and putting on Wide Range to at least Lv 3. I ran Wide Range Lv 5 as the primary healer, but it's truly helpful if everyone has Wide-Range to assure no one is close to fainting. An actual good tank character goes a long ways as it does stop Behemoth from wildly attacking and lets everyone else get in good damage. A good Lance or Heavy Bowgun made some of my runs so much easier.

[Mister Jack]

 

- Keep craftable flash pods and lifepowders on hand to have 13 of each item

- Use the temporal mantle

- Cut off his tail early to eliminate it as a threat

- Flash him whenever he tries to cast charybdis

- Avoid going directly in front of or underneath him as much as possible

- Learn his tells in order to block his physical attacks almost perfectly

- Avoid that bullshit ecliptic meteor attack

- Team carts in the last 10 minutes

 

[jayc4life]

I'm looking forward to Behemoth coming to PC so I can tackle it with my stack. That said, I've had a pretty decent experience with most of my SOS Flare drop-ins so far, but for something like Behemoth, I don't know if I'd trust randoms, even on the regular one.

 

Beat the game a few days ago, and hit HR51 last night. 150 something hours, and I know I can sink another 400+ into this EASILY.

 

EDIT: Figuring out you can reorder your pouch items on the pause menu has been a revelation. No idea why the game doesn't tell you you can do this, but it's nice not having to scroll past 10 other items flipping between my traps and my tranqs while trying to capture Deviljho.

Edited September 30, 2018 by jayc4life

[toxicitizen]

*sigh*

 

 

[Mister Jack]

Wait, that's REAL?  I thought that tweet was a joke! 

[toxicitizen]

Nah, the pic was posted on the verified instagram of an actor that's in the movie. To be fair, between Paul W.S. Anderson and the plot synopsis about monsters crossing over from a parallel world into ours or whatever the fuck it was, I knew to expect complete shit. But man, they're not even trying to make it look like they're making an actual Monster Hunter movie lol.

[Mister Jack]

Oh Christ, THAT guy is attached to it?  This is gonna hurt real bad.

[jayc4life]

We had been talking about it on Twitter, and one of us assumed it was Uwe Boll, and lo and behold, he appeared in our mentions.

 

The internet is WILD, yo.

[MetalCaveman]

I warned you, but you didn't listen!  

 

Mila Jovovich posted a picture with one of the weapons from the game, presumably to show that there will be monster hunting weapons in the Monster Hunter movie.

 

 

 

[MetalCaveman]

Some more details and a new photo:

 

https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/11/20/monster-hunter-exclusive-photo-capcom-video-game-movie-milla-jovovich-tony-jaa?abthid=5bf351efc944599979000951

Edited November 20, 2018 by MetalCaveman

[Mister Jack]

 

 

How long until Geralt is revealed for Smash Bros?

Edited December 10, 2018 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

I've played about 4 hours now, and I don't think this game is for me. It's not very much fun solo, and the multiplayer is a lot less seamless than I'd like for just casual random grouping.

[toxicitizen]

1 hour ago, TheMightyEthan said:

I've played about 4 hours now, and I don't think this game is for me. It's not very much fun solo, and the multiplayer is a lot less seamless than I'd like for just casual random grouping.

 

I had a blast playing solo and it's even more fun in co-op but yeah, that shit is pretty weird to set up. Figuring out how to play with my friend was way more trouble than it should've been. And I can't say I'm incredibly surprised that you didn't like it considering how you feel about Dark Souls. They're not really similar but they definitely scratched the same itch for me. All I can say is it didn't click immediately for me so it might be worth giving it a few more hours just in case.

[TheMightyEthan]

I'm in a weird place where when I'm not playing it I want to be, but once I am actually playing I'm like "this is kinda boring..."

[toxicitizen]

Lol for me it's usually the opposite. I started Wolfenstein II a couple weeks ago and even though I really enjoyed what I played so far, I just never really feel like playing it. So I'm stuck between forcing myself to finish it or uninstalling it because it's taking like 60GBs on my SSD.

 

For me, it's only when I fully embraced the thrill of the hunt that MHW finally clicked. Like, not just the combat but every aspect of it including preparation and tracking. So instead of getting annoyed every time a monster would run away, I was now a predator stalking its prey and the hunt was on again. Also if another monster starts fucking with your hunt, you can throw poop at them and they'll leave. 10/10

 

Oh and since you mentioned multiplayer, just in case this might have contributed to you not enjoying the game, keep in mind that health doesn't really scale when doing co-op. So a monster that I could kill in like 15mins solo would take forever to kill with my friend (even though it was his hunt and I had WAY better gear than him) because it still had like triple health even though it was only the two of us. So co-op could end up being more tedious than solo since it's weirdly balanced only for 4 players or whatever the max is. IIRC the upcoming expansion is introducing proper scaling.

 

Speaking of the expansion, I really need to get back to the game and finish the campaign before it comes out. I got pretty far into it but got distracted by other games and just never went back to it...

Edited August 20, 2019 by FLD

[Mister Jack]

@TheMightyEthan

Playing with randoms is probably the easiest way to do multi. All you have to do is shoot off a flare once you begin to open your hunt to the public. But if by "casual random grouping" you mean playing with your friends then yeah, I admit it's more cumbersome than it should be. Once you understand how it works it's not a huge deal, though. You just have to be playing on the same server.