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Monster Hunter Online

February 15, 2018February 15, 2018 by Belghast

There are times I do things that don’t make sense at all… but am nonetheless compelled to do them anyways. Last night was one of those nights and the madness that my brain was targeting involved seeing if I could actually get Monster Hunter Online installed and running. I had decided that I would end up hanging out with my wife last night and watching some olypmics while she graded, which meant I would be losing access to my beloved Monster Hunter World. I mean sure I could play it through PS Remote Play but the experience degrades so drastically since I am used to playing it on a 4K display in HDR. Early in the evening I had stumbled onto a video by Arekkz from June of 2016 where he attempted playing the game. This for whatever reason triggered something in my brain wanting to try it, much like I will sometimes devote way too much effort to trying to emulate something that I have sitting in my closet.

The first problem is that there are plenty of guides out there for playing Monster Hunter Online. The key problem with each of them is that they involve downloading some random package of binaries from either a file dump website or in some cases google drive. I do not trust downloading a “verified good” client from somewhere I don’t know as the originating source of the file. Basically that ruled out all of those options and left me sorting out the steps by myself. Essentially the step to get up and running look a little something like this.

Register a QQ Account – this is essentially the Tencent version of AIM and has a really weird profiling system that includes details like asking you for your blood type which is not creepy at all. I filled out only the minimum of information and found it hilarious that the QQ version of the Twitter Egg icon… is a crying baby. Apparently all Tecent games are driven by the QQ account and this will be a numerical address combined with a password. SAVE THIS NUMBER… there is apparently no great way to recover an account.
Download WeGame – WeGame is the Tencent version of Steam for lack of a better term for it. There is no english version so you are ultimately going to be flying blind here. All of the categories are in chinese except for FPS and MMORPG. Since what we are looking for is an MMORPG it was pretty easy to select that category and find the Monster Hunter Online logo shown above to start the download process.
Download Monster Hunter Online – there will be what appears to be an obvious download button when you find Monster Hunter Online in the menu. This seems to download the game in the background… so the process will show up in Task Manager but won’t actually be a window you can flip over to through Alt-Tab or through the task bar. I have really fast internet so it did not take long at all… but it involves two downloads one that is around 9 gb and another that is around 15 gb so it may take forever for you.
Launch Monster Hunter Online – when the game finally finishing installing which is an awkward and largely blind experience… it will show up in the left hand bar of the WeGame client. All the while it is downloading there will be what is the Monster Hunter Online theme playing in the background… that you can literally do nothing about. How I determined it was finished… was when the music went away. Immediately upon launching the game you will be presented with the next hurdle.
Fake a Chinese ID – You will immediately be presented with a page from QQ stating that the game cannot be played without some sort of national Chinese ID. This was not super surprising because when you attempt to play a lot of South Korean games you run into a similar problem. The difference here is that apparently the Chinese ID is an amalgam of a birthdate, region codes, and some randomized number all with a check bit to verify that it is “official”. As result there are tons of places online that offer you a generator to create your own. The one I linked is the one that worked for me… and quite honestly since I do not read chinese we engaged in a bit of pattern matching. You will need to make sure that you match up the names of the regions in both the generator and the client and unfortunately google translate only goes so far. I went with Bejing and what looked to be the most distinct pattern that I was able to match in both locations. SAVE THIS NUMBER.
Plug Code into QQ Page and Pray – The page that popped up when you launch Monster Hunter World should still be sitting there in the background, and for me at least I was able to pop that code into the box, hit submit and it worked first attempt. Your mileage may vary especially depending on your pattern matching skills on the earlier steps.
Relaunch Monster Hunter Online – If everything worked you will now be able to play Monster Hunter Online and have the same fun I did guessing what the buttons actually do in the character creation system. I managed to limp through the process of creating a character by guessing the logic that was used. On the lower left hand side there is a menu that appears to be some sort of a batch of presets… and then the button beside it to the right appears to be some sort of a confirmation that takes you to a prompt in the center of the screen that lets you name your character and enter the world. It accepted my english named character without any problems.

The next question you should be asking yourself is whether or not you should actually do this thing I just explained to you how to do. The short answer is no… you should not. You should really just stick to playing Monster Hunter World and waiting for the eventual PC release. The positive take away from last night is that I have a fully functional QQ account and will be able to play things that get released by Tencent in China if I so care to at some point. The bad part however is that the game is not great. Sure it sorta looks like Monster Hunter but more importantly it FEELS nothing like Monster Hunter World. If I did not know this was a purposeful collaboration between Capcom and Tencent I would have assumed the game was yet another asset flip mobile game because it is not pretty.

You are treated to this opening cutscene where some monster type I have never seen crashes into your airship. All the while the monster is clipping through the airship and as you begin to crash land the ship itself randomly clips in and out of the mountain side. When you finally get to ground level you have to fight yet another monster that I don’t recognize… but it could have been an overly stylized version of a Rathian. During this fight you are provided with MMO style telegraphs on the ground to denote where the monster is going to attack. These show up well before the actual animation sequence starts taking out a bit of the fun of playing Monster Hunter in the first place which is reading the monsters attacks.

I am not sure if everyone starts out as longsword but I lucked into that allowing me to try out a weapon that I already understand the attack patterns of which helped me get acclimatized quickly. In the grand scheme of things the attacks were all recognizable and worked much the same as if I had been using a controller. The equivalent of my Triangle attack was on the left mouse button and the equivalent of my R2 attack was on the right mouse button… with the short jab circle attacks being tied to E. Z for whatever reason became the interact/harvest key which is only explained after you encounter your first herb plant to harvest. You are not really given enough time after your first actual monster encounter to harvest the corpse.

It was playable but the post tutorial interface was clogged with tons of cash shop functionality that I never could figure out how to get rid of. It was around the time I arrived in the first town that I finally decided to just stop playing and find something better to do with my evening. The game did not feel great and the visuals felt cheaply thrown together and appear to be vastly different than the original images I saw from the first versions of the game. The game appears to have been stylized a bit more away from the traditional Monster Hunter vibe, and in doing so the appearance and experience seems to have been cheapened significantly.

At the end of the day I highly suggest you not do the thing that I did last night. I still felt largely compelled to explain how I did it though in case someone wanted to follow in my footsteps. This methodology allows you to go to the original sources and get the actual files instead of hoping and praying that some google drive share doesn’t give you a bit coin mining virus. I could not get any of the screenshots I took last night working, so instead I had to harvest a few from the interwebs for the purpose of this post. Ash warned me away from this madness but sometimes I just feel compelled to do stupid things.

[Edit – 2/15/2018 – 10 am]

After posting this… Ashgar suggested that in fairness I should at least namedrop Dauntless here. Right now it is in fact a PC based Monster Hunter like game available in closed beta. To get into that said beta however you either need to be a media personality/streamer of some note… or to pay for it. There are varying levels of access that start at $40 and end at $80 (that used to be $100 and the way you got into alpha). I’ve played this briefly at Pax South a few years back but can’t really speak to the state of the game. If you are interested I would suggest you check out the video by Skill-Up that I will link below. His take is that the game has promise, but it is not really a replacement for Monster Hunter yet. So I return to my original advise of just waiting for World to be released on the PC.

A Social Weekend

February 12, 2018 by Belghast

It was a pretty great weekend as far as hunting monsters goes. I got to hang out with so many different groups of people and do so many varied things. On Friday night it was all about hanging out with Tam, Ash and Kodra as I was finally up late enough to allow our schedules to align. On Saturday it was all about hanging out with Pizza Maid, Wolfy and Rakuno… and then in a little pre-podcast gaming some more with Tam, Ash and Kodra. Then Sunday I streamed for a bit in the morning between editing two podcasts. Then in the evening I spent quite a bit of time in the evening running around with Sushi Geisha and Smashy doing some high rank egg birb killing among other things. The variety and quality of my company was absolutely the best.

The other thing that really happened this weekend is that I spent a ton of time hanging out with various groups of folks on twitch. I’ve never really acclimatized to that community but right now I am spending a significant amount of time with folks connected to the very awesome casual/positive Moogle’s Pom Tavern. They have all accepted me as one of their own and call me a streamer even though I barely qualify as one. Just to give some shout outs… some of the folks I spent time lurking or actively hanging out in are…

Right now my jam seems to be playing Monster Hunter on the 43 inch 4k monitor while trying to cram a bunch of windows on one of the 23 inch monitors. As a result a lot of the time I have spent soloing, has been hanging out in a twitch stream and occasionally throwing random comments. During the shenanigans of Saturday and Sunday I actually wound up on voice chat and as a result “on stream” with Pizza and Sushi. The world got many opportunities to watch me fail at longswording and miss attacks as monsters shifted on me in combat. It was a lot of fun and I need to sort out a time when I can stream for myself more regularly. I had a lot of fun with the little bit that I did this weekend and the whole Sunday morning is starting to turn into a routine.

As far as Monster Hunter itself… I have now progressed into High Rank hunts but have not done a whole lot of them. I’ve taken down Pukei Pukei which is the gatekeeper of sorts to unlock High Rank, and then taken down Kulu-Ya-Ku a bunch of times to farm bits so I could upgrade to this crazy two handed scimitar of sorts called Last Dance I. I am wearing a mishmash of gear because I basically went to the workshop and crafted whatever the hell I could as soon as I hit high rank. As a result I have 1 piece of Zorah Magdaros gear, 2 pieces of High Rank Bone and 2 pieces of High Rank Alloy gear. This shockingly has wound up being a fairly reasonable set of gear to run around and do stuff with, and the added defense helped a lot as compared to the amount of damage I was taking during the Pukei Pukei fight.

I could go into a bunch of detail about the various hunts I did, but for this morning I am not. The weekend as a whole was all about hanging out with various groups of people for me. That is always the problem I have when it comes to online gaming. There are so many different groups that I want to be hanging out with. I spent a lot of the weekend as a sort of fill in, but still had a blast in doing so. Right now the timing for me is just weird in actually hanging with the AggroChat crew given that the majority are now on the west coast. On most nights they are starting to get active around 9 pm… as I am starting to wind down and prep to head to bed. This has made organizing anything in a time other than the weekend a pretty fraught experience.

The whole grouping experience in Monster Hunter does not make this easier, given that for much of the weekend folks were having trouble joining specific sessions. I know last night we kept trying to get a 4th in to help them with some quests… but the sessions kept timing out. What I crave the most for Monster Hunter World is some form of a viable friends list, with the ability to invite to parties from it… and even more importantly have a Diablo 3 style “request to be invited” system. I hope as time passes that the whole cludge that is grouping in this game improves. That said… the core experience is compelling enough that I can look past all of that nonsense as I obsess about getting monster bits to make awesome weapons and outfits.

Apex Predators

February 9, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I participated in a little bit of non-game related nonsense. Over the Christmas break I rearranged my set up so that I am essentially sharing a 43 inch 4k display for both console and PC gaming. I still have access to the PC via the secondary monitor to the side, but the main display will be showing my PS4. The idea was that this would give me access to my proper mic while playing console games and allow me to hang out on teamspeak or discord while playing. The only problem there is that my only sound option for console gaming… has been to have it play through the television speakers, which means while streaming… it gets picked up by my microphone. My alternate solution was to try and string a usb headset to my PS4 while playing but it was less than optimal and I didn’t have a long enough cord to route it around where it was not in the way.

So I set forth with a mission… figure out a way to pipe the input from my television into my PC. The television only has optical toslink out and the pc has a 3.5 mm mini jack for input, which meant I needed some sort of a bridge to make the connection work. After some googling I stumbled across this little device that will convert a digital input… like toslink to an analog signal like RCA/Mini. After a bunch of fiddling and some rewiring I got it set up… and once I set my system to “listen” to the line in port… I had console audio coming in through my PC sound card. This left me with the problem of needing some way to have a microphone for PSN chat.

After some rummaging I found my first Blue microphone… the Nessie and decided to give it a shot. This is the point where I am thankful I have a rudamentary system of storage boxes because I needed to find some way of stringing a micro usb cord from the other side of my monitor all the way around the back of my desk and over to my PS4. The final solution was an old samsung charging cable combined with an amazon basics usb extender, but after some fiddling it worked. Now I can comfortably swap between PC gaming and PS4 gaming without having to grab a new headset or do any manipulation. While it doesn’t seem like much… it felt like a major victory to me last night.

As far as my night in Monster Hunter…. I spent a lot of time doing minor content while watching Sushi’s stream and chatting with the other folks in channel on my second monitor. This is the other use case I have found for this setup is letting me hang out on twitch while playing console games, which is a good deal of fun. The only negative is I try and cram discord, slack, hangouts and a twitch window on a 23 inch monitor… that seems ridiculously tiny next to the 43 inch I am playing the game on. I’ve been on this mission to repair my cash flow problem and as a result I have been doing a bunch of investigations that reward around the 4000-5000 zenny mark. Essentially there are two wants right now… being able to craft a new sword from the egg bird line to see how well it works with its high affinity rating. The other is to craft a new set of gear but I am sorta up in the air as to what to go with.

Basically in the coming evenings I should really start doing focused hunts and going after specific monsters to get parts. I hate fighting the Radobaan, but right now… it is one of my favorite armor sets. I need Radobaan parts to complete the weapon I am shooting for as well… so in theory it means in the near future I am going to start going after the tar dragon with seriousness. It was a pretty straight forward fight, but was just annoying getting good hits on it and knocking off bits of the bone armor. I am bad at actually seeking groups for things and instead just end up piddling around on my own most of the time. Regardless… my current set of armor feels like it is starting to be a little dated.

When I finally got back to doing more serious content, I picked up on the quest line that asked me to go to the bottom of the Rotten Vale. I am not exactly sure what I expected down there, but the supposed bottom floor is a lot more survivable than the one that Great Girros roams around. There seemed to be way fewer poison clouds going on, and not much in the way of annoying adds. While down there I ran into my favorite character that I have no clue what she is called… but a wiki is telling me she is called the Field Master. I question if she is actually another hunter, or if instead she is just one of the handlers that decided to break out on her own.

This lead to the appearance of a monster called Odogoron that was honestly one of the more annoying fights I have dealt with in awhile. Much like Legiana, this one can deal a lot of damage in a really short amount of time and I wound up fainting a few times because I simply was not watching my health bar as closely as I should. The other problem I ran into is this thing is insanely fast, so the only times I could really just go to town on it were when my palico had it distracted or I had blinded it with a flash pod. The rest of the time I was constantly in a state of trying to make sure it was not about to turn on me and decimate my life bar. I am not even sure how this works, but once I cut off its tail it seemed to be super susceptible to being knocked down which allowed me to unleash some spirit blade combos.

After wrapping that fight up, I decided to keep going with the story rather than retreating into a chill expedition. After some tracking around I found myself on a quest to essentially kill the Apex predators of the Ancient Forest and the Wildspire Wastes… aka Rathalos and Diablos. I did not have the energy in me to start either of those so I went back to investigations for awhile. I now have two quests in my log ready for me to start the hunts for these two big beasts… and I am guessing I am not terribly far from starting high rank once I knock them out of the skies. I really could use Rathalos parts because I believe they unlock some interesting crafting options. Still very much enthralled by this game and looking forward to venturing deeper into it.

Ice and Frost Dragons

February 7, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday was more or less madness. The last few days have been super stressful for a bunch of reasons that I don’t really want to get into, but its a sort of stress that I am not used to dealing with. The sort of stress that takes what should be a super familiar and safe environment and makes everything seem weird and tense. Last night I had a very late meeting that ultimately went over the allotted time, and by the time I left… we had gotten some freezing rain. That meant that driving home was in itself a tense experience as well with everyone poking along at a snails pace. There is this whole judgement game that happens as well, because in theory my normal route is the least populated of the possible routes home. So I question if I should take it or try and stick to the busier route… and as a result more prone to be delayed by wrecks and probably much slower.

Needless to say my normal ten to fifteen minute commute was turned into roughly an hour. When got to town I also needed to make a run by the local grocery store around the corner from my house. Normally this is a massive pitfall because people go insane when there is even the slightest sign of winter weather. We were completely out of coffee creamer however… something I really didn’t want to go home without so I went against better judgement and walked into the grocery store. In truth it was not nearly as bad as I was expecting… there are times where even the lightest dusting of snow can cause the grocery store to look like the apocalypse hit with entire aisles of food missing. This time however it was just about three times as busy as normal, but no frantic rushing around and hoarding food. That said… it had been about three weeks since we had been to a grocery store so while there I decided to pick up considerably more than just coffee creamer allowing myself to succumb to a bit of the madness as well.

I got home and made dinner… which in our case was some piping hot frito chilli pies because I needed something to defrost. The actual temperature was in the 20s but with wind chill factored in… it felt like the low teens, which for the northerners that might be reading this blog is not that big of a problem. However those of us who are used to 115 degree August weather are not exactly designed for this sort of frigid weather. I don’t even have a proper coat because we need one so rarely, which meant I have been roaming around in this in my hoodie. The frito pies did their job however and warmed me up enough to consider actually doing something this evening other than huddling underneath a fuzzy blanket and staring blankly at the television. Considering the late hour… I opted to settle into my office and play a little monster hunter considering I was about an hour late for my other obligation and it would have been weird to drop in at that point.

One of the things about Monster Hunter World is that I seem like I am only really capable of handling one big monster hunt each evening. As a result I am progressing painfully slow through the quest content that ultimately gates everything in the game. Sunday I tackled Radobaan and to a lesser extent Great Girros while roaming around in an expedition. That mean’t a trip back to the Third Fleet Master to once again descend to the bottom of the Rotten Vale. Unshockingly we once again encountered a problem that required my attention. Our path took us straight through the hunting grounds of a Legiana, which is a giant frost dragon of sorts that seems to like to gobble up the flying bird/wyvern things that hang out in the Coral Highlands. We pissed it off… and as a result I needed to go kill it so we could continue downwards.

This is not a terribly easy hunt for a Longsword because it spends most of its time in the air. Sure I can chip away at it slowly by swinging up at it… but that also put me in prime territory for its two main attacks. The first of these is a claw dive of a sort that did about a third of my health bar each time I connected with it properly. The second is the more annoying because it has lasting effects in the form of laying down a line of frost on the ground. Getting hit with the frost itself seemed to take me down two thirds of my health bar, and getting into the frost seemed to have a lasting slow effect that made dodging everything more annoying. The other major problem is this monster runs way more often than your average bear… and like all flyers in this game can travel half a map away in a few seconds forcing you to traverse some truly awkward terrain.

I’ve only actually failed a single hunt so far in Monster Hunter World, and that was the first time I attempted Anjanath. That one I mostly chock up to not paying attention and not watching my health bar anywhere near as close as I should have. Legiana however… was painfully close. When I finally took the monster down I had less than five minutes to go on the hunt, and was down to my last faint. The thing about a close fight like this… is that when you finally defeat it… you feel absolutely exhilarated. I had originally intended to just do the one hunt and go to bed, but instead I needed something to do to sorta come down off the high of the really difficult encounter. As a result I popped downstairs and saw that Sushi was streaming, and hung out there for a bit while roaming around and doing minor things in monster hunter over Playstation Remote Play.

The night did not go at all how I had intended it. I did not intend to be super late getting home, and I definitely had not planned on the painful drive home. I also had not planned on fielding messages and emails throughout the night about a recent promotion at work. All in all however it was still a good night, and I was super pumped to move the story needle at least a little bit in this game that I am rapidly becoming indoctrinated into. Expeditions are still more my speed and I’ve spent a lot of time roaming around the newly unlocked areas like Coral Highlands and Rotten Vale. I believe there are two more areas of the game but supposedly those do not unlock until I officially get into the “high rank” hunt territory.

My favorite part of the night however is that all of my shenanigans allowed me to upgrade my weapon to the Hard Bone Shotel II which with my current gear layout gives me a base attack power of 505. That is honestly the biggest problem I am seeing with switching weapons is the fact that none of them are even close to the attack power I currently have available to me through the “bone” weapon line. I see longsword folks running around with much cooler looking weapons… but ultimately they have not been able to compete with the raw attack power of my bone weapon.

At some point I want to jump ship to the “dragon” line of weapons… but that is going to require silly amounts of farming of fairly difficult fights like Rathian. For the moment I am happy with my damage output and the rather homely looking bone weapon hanging off of my back. I think my big focus over the next few game sessions is going to be trying to farm the ore needed to get the next real set of upgrades over the gear I am wearing. I feel like I am pretty close to the next “big” fight, so I might attempt that tonight as well. All in all still loving this game and still wanting more of it.