I think there are better ways but it’s not easy and it involves spending a lot of time on custom level areas and scripting. They should rethink those 1-star quests, too, and build out an actual tree of low-level boss fights instead of thinking making people fight trash mobs will teach them anything.
Demon’s Souls had a similarly difficult task – it’s a game with swords and bows but you can’t play it like any other game – and the first hour is amazing at demonstrating the threat in the world, the necessity of aggro management, the proper speed of play. Boy, just the first staircase in 1-1 (after the mood-setting forced death) has strong lessons in managing threat.
booji and anothergod and myself just took three runs at the third (t-rex) boss and we got closer every time, if we’d figured out how to get up to his little canopy lair at the very end quicker on our last run we’d have had him. everything on him was broken and he was limping a whole lot.
actually for real feeling it at this point; both locked in that I’m buying it and that I’m content to wait for the real economy before playing more. I kind of want to play every minute of this with sbers though so I hope we have a big enough PS4 group.
yeah, shoot, i woke up feeling pretty awful today, coming down with something for sure, so i was hard to sit down and play much without feeling really comfortable. I’m 110% behind this game, so we’ll be playing for sure.
ideally i’d love an organized weekly sb monhun time this winter…
also quest timers are usually much more generous in past mh games? 20 minutes is a bit tight, but if that was intentional for this demo i think it was a very clever move.
Played a bit more of the beta (did the intermediate quest) and feel more comfortable saying that the game just isn’t for me. Or that it might be for me, but I have no interest in putting the dozen or so hours into an entry to find out if it’d grow on me.
The one thing I will note is that I thought the beasts I did fight somehow provided a combination of good feedback (“hey, it’s limping!”) and poor feedback (“I think it’s been limping for several minutes now, am I even doing damage at this point oh the two hundredth hit killed it and I had no clue it was even near death”). This is probably heresy and people will yell at me for saying this… but a health bar would be much more handy than context-less numbers popping up each hit.
You’re carrying expectations from other games and the game isn’t letting you know how it works.
The imprecision in the player’s read of the monster’s HP is important to make risk-taking more interesting and encourage players to learn monster behaviors (for example, monsters can both limp at low health and get tired). It also supports the aesthetic, ‘hunt big game’.
After a period of time, you’ll gain an understanding of the states monsters enter and how much fight is left in them. But I remember that exact feeling and the mistakes I made as I got reckless when I didn’t realize it had a full third of its life left.
The explicit damage numbers are new, or at least they weren’t in the PSP games, which was the last time I paid attention. In those, you had to rely on the animations and size of the gushers of blood when you struck a monster.
I did have some expectation that I was buying into a somewhat idiosyncratic game with big fat health pools and to that end it has not let me down especially
I like how there are three different ways to use items and none of them are initially intuitive
and there’s enough going on that it being forgiving in every respect other than time pressure feels right
I can’t get the radial button to work reliably at all so I just gave up on it, which is a shame since it’s so fast when it works. I also equipped a mantle accidentally once and spent the rest of the quest trying to figure out how to un-equip it, because picking it again didn’t work.
I haven’t played a monhun since PS2 and I’m finding the demo really enjoyable. Even though I don’t know what most of the items are for, and there are a ton of weapons I have no idea how to use. Are hammers good? Do people like hammer users in their groups online? Smashing heads with the overhead swing is so satisfying I kinda don’t want to get into anything else. Also I can’t figure out how to jump / mount monsters to beat them up.
I named my cat Wendy and the little raft she paddles around in the water is the best.
I’m surprised they dropped the blood/hit FX as damage indicators. Numbers appeal to certain players and will make the guide creators happy but focusing on naturalistic hit responses for feedback is something I thought they were good enough for (the important info for the player is: How strong is this attack I’m playing? And how weak is this monster part I’m hitting? Because both range 10-fold). At least, don’t throw the concept out when you add numbers.
The mantle is an item? I couldn’t figure it out and assumed it had its own button. That’ll be aggravating to keep ready with all the other battle items.
Yeah, mantles are items you equip on the item menu and then get the effects of for a set period of time, then you have to let them recharge (but you don’t need to take them off).
I didn’t use the item wheel at all, just the olde fashioned hold L and use square/circle to cycle.
you can make it so that you click in the right stick to select an item on the wheel - this is way better than the default. i think you can set up multiple wheels of items and switch between them with the d-pad too - this definitely seems like the best way to handle lots of stuff once you get used to it
and yes hammers rule forever of course (all the weapons rule)
Lances rule hard now. You can charge for days now with the lowered stamina drain on it and you can step left or right or even 180 and keep running. It can also guard step left, right and back now and has an attack with natural Minds Eye effect. Lance gonna be a monster.
I tend to gravitate towards the heavier weapons like GS and hammer, I’m really into big, juicy, premeditated hits. Lance never drew me in because the whole poke-poke, evade, poke-poke didn’t feel as satisfying to me, but these changes have got me really interested. Looks like if your footsies are good you can just stream damage. Gonna make a serious effort to learn it this time around for sure.
I need to go back and find the post rye made on old selectbutton that really made MH click for me after I struggled with it for a while because it’ll probably help everyone else in here