felyne

Missing Cat Chef Theater

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Good Morning Folks! Late Thursday evening Monster Hunter Wilds dropped and I spent a good chunk of time over the weekend playing it. At this point I have racked up just shy of 13 hours and it is weird how fast the muscle memory from Monster Hunter World came back to me. A lot of the controls are different this time around and I have slowly been tweaking things to make them work a bit better. Other than a few wonky performance issues here and there I have mostly had a pretty great time. I’ve been largely focused on the Main Story Quest, but feel like I need to spend a bit more time smelling the roses and exploring the zones. Truth be told my favorite things about the previous game was the expedition zones and tagging in on SOS flares to help folks down bosses. I’ve done a bit of both, but nowhere near as much as I probably should be.

At this point I am down in the third zone and about to fight by my count the fourth major boss. I am not sure if the game is bugged out but I don’t seem to have a quest marker showing me where I should be going next. I roamed around a bit last night and could not figure out where the game was trying to send me. I’ve crafted a bit of gear and trying something that I never really did in the previous game. I’ve equipped a weapon set that causes sleep, so we will see how that bodes for the next major encounter. I took my first death on the Lava Apes and things seem to be ramping up a bit. I think part of the problem was that I did not make a cool drink for the fight, and I think I was taking heat debuffs the entire time. I should probably focus on taking care of those things, which will require roaming around the expedition areas a bit more to collect goods.

One of my only complaints right now is that I miss the Felyne cooking scenes. We have a cute Palico that appears to be wearing a tomato pincushion as a hat… which is pretty great. However I really miss the elaborate cooking scenes and while technically more useful… cooking the food myself is not as fun. Maybe as the game progresses we will get back the kitchen, but I fear that is probably not the case. Even in Monster Hunter Rise they made Dango. Sadly the game peaked at Monster Hunter World and will probably never reach such peaks of Felyne culinary prowess again. This is probably a dumb thing to complain about, but really it was a core chunk of my enjoyment.

I think my new favorite bit from Wilds though are the WudWuds. I have no clue WHAT they are “preslicedly”. Maybe beavers or otters? Whatever the case, I think they are pretty great. So much of my enjoyment of this game come from the non-human characters that we interact with. I had forgotten how much I needed this level of cat adjacent nonsense in my life. We are going through dark times right now, and having a bit of pure escapism is precious. Hunting big monsters with my cat friend that is styled after my own chaos goblin Gracie has been quite a bit of fun. I do sort of get drained by the game, which makes me think I need to spend more time just roaming around the world looting materials. I spent so much of my time in the first game doing that, and I pretty much need to adopt the same stance in this game.

It is definitely a worthy successor to Monster Hunter World. I also dig the ability to be in multiple squads which serve the purpose of guilds. Here is a screen that shows my friend code, if you are playing the game feel free to throw me an invite. So far it seems to be working pretty seamlessly across all of the available platforms. Part of me wants to keep my head down until I hit the end game and then devote the bulk of my time crafting proper gear sets. However I think I will probably enjoy myself if I just mill around a bit and do some nonsense along the way. I’ve yet to actually group up with anyone, and I am contemplating throwing out an SOS for the next boss encounter just to make it go more quickly.

That is really my only complaint about this game is that it continues to provide limited feedback as to how the battle is going. We have a health bar, but what I really want is a boss health bar. The whole system of changing the icon on the mini-map and also getting hints from the guide that follows you along in battle… are fine and all but the game would feel better if you had clear feedback as to how much impact you are actually making during the fight. As it stands now it feels like you are essentially beating a bag of hit points that then randomly falls over and lets you carve it. I get that this is a conscious choice in the design of the Monster Hunter franchise, but I feel like it is the wrong one, especially in the “World” series which is designed to be more approachable.

All in all though I am having fun. I ultimately knew I would because I went completely obsessive about this game series when Worlds released back in 2018. So much so that I played through the progression on PlayStation and then started over from scratch again and leveled everything up on PC when it finally released on that platform. I am very happy that this time we are getting Console and PC releases at the same time with full cross play.

Bludgeoned with Adorable

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I have been a horrible person and should feel bad.  One of the usual suspects missing from the Monster Hunter madness has been my good friend and often partner in crime…  Grace.  Her original line of logic was that she was going to wait until the PC release, and I was largely cool with that because when I started playing Monster Hunter World I absolutely intended to do what I did with Destiny 2.  That is to restart when the PC version came out and focus on that from that point forwards as my primary platform.  However the longer I have played Monster Hunter World the more I have doubted if I could actually do this thing.

Quitting Destiny 2 on the console and restarting on PC felt like it was a no brainier… and at the end of the day I was not really giving that much up.  However I already feel way more attached to what I have on Monster Hunter World than I ever did to a handful of weapons that I easily regained the moment I started grinding things out again on Destiny 2.  The other core problem is the fact that there is no announced date for Monster Hunter World for the PC.  When I decided to restart Destiny 2 only a month had passed since the launch of the console versions, and really…  it allowed me to redo all of those things I maybe should have done differently.

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When Monster Hunter World finally launches on the PC something along the lines of six months or more will have passed and that is more than enough time to get acclimatized to a game and pass the threshold of being willing to give all of that up to go elsewhere.  In part Monster Hunter World feels more like an MMORPG than Destiny 2 did, and those are the sort of games that you really move into.  I love my gear and my weapons and having to give all of that up would feel extremely alienating.  While I might have every intent of trying out the PC release, I have a feeling I would bounce pretty hard without my stuff.  Now in Destiny 1 I reached this point and it was in part why I had so much struggle getting any measure of traction on the Xbox One client.  I am not saying never to Monster Hunter World on the PC…  just that I doubt it will become my primary platform over night.

As a result Mor and I have been waging this guerilla campaign of deluging Grace with pictures of Palicos and Poogie.  Last night for example I sent her the above image of the two Palicos in my room playing harp music for me.  I think the final straw that broke her with adorable…  is when I sent one of the Tailrider Safari cutscenes.  Whatever the case she relented and downloaded the game last night, installing it and joining the madcap community of folks playing Monster Hunter World.  When she first started Destiny I made the mistake of trying to drag her around to experience all of the content that I loved.  However this wound up with a really choppy experience so for the most part I am going to be around to answer questions, but try my level best to just let her experience this game.

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That is not to say that shortly after taking down the Great Jagras I did drag her through a Kulu-Ya-Ku kill for completely “pure pure” reasons as PizzaMaid would say.  The Great Jagras costume for palicos is not exactly a good one… so instead I figured that a single kill of Kulu would get her more than enough parts to make that set of armor for her Palico so she could begin the process of dressing it in increasingly ludicrous costumes.  As a result she is now the proud owner of a lute wielding fake moustache cat, and I think the barbs of the hook are officially set.  The game is completely nonsense but has a charm to it that is undeniable once you experience it.  I also think that while taking down that Jagras, she got a taste of the other side of the coin that makes the game super fun to experience.

Regardless…  I should feel bad by bludgeoning my friend over the head with adorable pictures from the game until she caved.  However I don’t really because this is absolutely the sort of game that she would love and was only waiting for an undetermined PC release date that might see her playing alone.  For awhile I had said that Horizon Zero Dawn was worth every penny of buying a PS4 just to play it.  I feel like Monster Hunter World is also sort of in that category, with the exception being that it also exists on Xbox One.  The problem there is…  my core base is on PS4 and as a result I see very little reason to play anything but the scant exclusives on the Xbox platform.  Most Xbox exclusives eventually see a PC release apart from Forza and Halo, and in the grand scheme of things at least in that scenario I would rather wait.  PS4 is my console and ecosystem of choice and I am pretty happy about that.