Yeah there has long been a market for stuff that came in a bundle sold separately as “new” on eBay and Amazon. My wife bought me a copy of GTAV that was 100% from a bundle, but they literally has cut off the UPC DO NOT SELL thing with a knife because…yeah.
Rathalos and Diablos time y’all
I kept wanting to replace my stupid massive bulbous metal armour and when I went to the workshop the best thing I could make was a dog mask so I just look like an asshole
at least I have the Hard Bone Rod No. 2
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Just beat these two tonight; was a pretty good time. I mostly used Lance in previous MHs so I’ve been using that about half my missions and the other half I’m randomly flirting with other weapons.
I tried the dragon glaive against Rathalos and I think I’m a fan! Most weapons have a hard time against monsters that fly all the time but I was jumping up to meet her! The buff management can be a bit much sometimes but otherwise it’s quite fun!
are you in the squad???
I didn’t get a good feel for the buff management until my 10th hunt at least but I like it a lot now
No I’m on Xbox 
Boooooo
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hey hi hello it’s been a week since release and being in yet another layer of purgatory with waiting for the pc version sucks but I am going to vent with finishing off p3rd with a friend plus talking a little more about the old established setting and thematic stuff while you all get to actually play
with 1, subtly leaning on 2, I think I alluded to it a fair number of times as thematic implications, but whatever, there’s even more attention to it now. when having two large monsters present at once was already a fair bit of stress on the engine alone, one of the more subtle fashions of implying environmental interactions was with monsters doing what hunters do and making them wear / wield the remains / armaments of other monsters / humans. giant spiders draped in the flayed skin of prey giant rubbery birds and thunderous leech-stalkers, changing elemental weaknesses from those monsters to their own on skin-breaking, bristling with extra-potent poison and paralysis as those monsters wield. titanic burrowing hermit crabs wearing found skulls of other earth dragons, with the charging dragon’s skull useful for backwards attacks and the laser-breath rock dragon’s skull being an ideal firing medium for water lasers. insect queens being carried around by their winged drones as they also serve as turrets, eventually smashing them apart for desperate sustenance or shattering them as aimed projectiles. you know, standard stuff.
a fair number of recent final bosses have been a little more brazen about this, leaning a little on the bigger dragons and the defences humanity used to go to war with them. there’s a gigantic bubbling wraith that drips with explosive oil after devouring gunpowder stocks and bristles with anti-dragon spear still lodged in it, a huge cuttlefish that acts as its own hunter with makeshift bone armour and the weapons of its prey, and a golden mantis empress that tears apart monster defense fortresses to maintain her scrap metal mecha. pretty much all of these rather deliberately don’t look anything like the normal default dinosaur-dragons (who, to their credit, occasionally resemble player weapons instead), which helps make them quiet little foils to humanity.
sadly, most all of these monsters are absent from World’s roster, though there’s at least one fun example in the ruler of the souls-esque corpse-swamp formed from one of the biggest series monsters just dying naturally without being picked apart by humans afterwards- a dragon that cultivates a parasitic miasma with the corpses of its own species. (also makes for an interesting parallel to the absent chameleos, as uncurable temporary max health damage kinda works much better than poison). beyond that, I don’t quite know what World does for the whole ecological thing beyond directly showing local + broader food chains and having monsters that call for other monsters again- I’d love to see somebody answer this some more.
…
2 is weird, demanding a certain kind of dissonance, and CourierRice’s answer of ecological / social endangerment is only the tip of it- quite a few quests descriptions are also selfish in asking for monster parts, and the overall system requires quite a bit of ignoring the sheer scale of hunting going on. I sort of justify it to myself that the combination of rather deliberately lively monsters, genuine serious methodical fighting, and iterative designs plus materials grinding all combine together to make me know and think more about these monsters than 95% of human opponents and blind obstacles in any other video game. sparring, I guess, that just happens to be depicted as hunting- some connection to nature in the limited way video games tend to approach it.
I don’t know how to feel about World’s weird plot in this context, here. Migration to a new world / consoles to a land the monsters migrate to die naturally, interrupting them for the sake of profit and study, is kind of unsubtle in and of itself- having the final boss being an inexplicable being furthering and feasting upon such attraction is contextually off but also pretty understandable. paired with the volcano pushed into the sea, it’s weird for saying one way of dying is better than the other, but whatever. it does have one interesting excuse for prior issues, but it requires a reading that I doubt is canonical- that capturing monsters instead of killing them keeps them around for observation before letting them go again, and the random quest rewards are for scattered strewn-about broken off parts rather than chopping up them up afterwards. monsters seem to regenerate a little when the same given individual is ever refought again, anyways.
it’s rarely explicitly examined, I guess, but this isn’t much of a stretch from the main text.
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i picked this up last night! psn is thevinculumgate, i think most of y’all are on my list already tho. i have no idea how the multiplayer is supposed to work. is there a lobby i should join? or do y’all add me?
either way i have good hair & 2 big ol’ knives
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@bib has to add you to the lobby which is permanent but you both have to be online at the same time for the invite to go through and they have an implausibly short expiration time
so really the best solution is to just nag them when you see them
oh cool i’ll keep an eye out
Interestingly, a lot of dialogue weight is expended on emphasizing that the mission is for study, and not necessarily killing. Researchers are a prime component of your group (and one of the five groups was almost entirely composed of researchers, and after being stranded for two decades, seem to have reverted to a buddhist temple crossed with an opium den state of remove from the world).
I believe this is a reaction to the higher fidelity; as the monsters look more beautiful and personable the harshness of the player’s actions demands more excuse. In the same way realistic graphics have strangled the arcade racer and turned shooters to near-uniform grim tones.
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also I’m excited to help out lower level folks now that I’m actually kind of good at this and not the slowest/newest player on top of that, I got a lot of goodwill to repay
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I have yet to monhun with a group, I am stoked.
Jo it is possible we have picked near-identical character models.
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I really want to play this but I have no money or time so I’m super, super sad but happy for you guys but sad wow
I will always help out low ranked people, no questions asked.
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bustedastromech kinda beat me to this but I think the ecological head researcher says this exact thing? wrt the regeneration, that seems like a believable take given that all wyverns are considered at least somewhat reptilian and therefore could grow parts back
what had me shook was seeing that capturing a monster unlocks a gladiatorial arena quest 
in other news: I finally got into a fight with a subspecies and my house had a brief power outage lol
guess that’s just jesus’ way of telling me I need to get to working on tomorrow’s snes cast recording
And! I believe you can capture to end an arena quest – consigning your gladiator to a life of FIGHT
I think this is where game mechanics start punching story through meaning in the face
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i would like to get added to the selectsquad and hunt with y’all
find me at AndroidNK1124
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i dunno
like someone once said, you love to hunt the monsters and the monsters love to be hunted