Looking Back at Monster Hunter Wilds at Launch

Monster Hunter Wilds started with “Mixed” Steam reviews at its official launch, and this post is an evaluation of how that launch looks when I look back on it now. I’ll write just three points each for the pros, the cons, and the mixed. For the pros, I can pick that they gave out a lot of Decorations so building a set was easy, that the combat itself was fun, and that farming was convenient. For the cons, I’ll skip optimization since it’s too well known, and go with the inventory limit, the cramped combat areas, and the difficulty. For the mixed, I’ll write about whether Elder Dragons appear, the guaranteed rare-drop quests, and the Seikret’s auto-movement.

Starting with the first pro, that they gave out a lot of Decorations: my real start with the series was World. I don’t remember exactly what the expected time to get an Attack Jewel was, but I remember it being something like 400 hours. Going by what I remember from then, the guides were all written on the assumption that you already had everything down to the Decorations. So even with the guides, I thought: to put together a set, you really have to grind an enormous amount of time. This isn’t something I can do while going to cram school. That’s what I told myself as I gave up. But Wilds gave out a lot of Decorations, so at the very least, getting a set together was much easier.

Another pro is that the combat itself was fun. I used the Gunlance a lot, and maybe thanks to the effects and the sound, Perfect Guard was great fun. I hunted Gore Magala a lot in particular. I don’t know why taking on Arkveld needs Guard Up while Gore Magala doesn’t, but I could get past every one of its patterns with Perfect Guard without Guard Up, which was quite fun.

Last, you can farm from a distance with the Slinger, and with the Hook Slinger you can pull things in right away without even aiming at them, which felt very comfortable. The map is big, but maybe because there’s a limit on the number of Pop-up Camps, there are a few spots where the farming points are clustered, as if telling you outright to farm here. So just fast traveling (teleporting) to that Pop-up Camp made farming quite easy.

Moving on to the cons, the inventory limit was really inconvenient. As I wrote at the end of the pros above, farming got easier, but once the inventory was full, it kept asking which of my items to throw out, and that was really annoying. If I pulled in everything I saw with the Hook Slinger while crossing the map, from the middle on it kept asking which one to throw out. And if I farmed out of habit while heading into a quest to hunt, it asked again. So I changed my habit to farm only when I fast traveled to that Pop-up Camp. Fortunately, now items go into the sub-pouch automatically and it doesn’t ask anymore.

When it comes to the Wilds map, there’s one phrase you see everywhere: “The map is big, but it feels small.” I strongly agree. Honestly, going by combat area size alone, there are more medium-sized areas than you’d expect. The problem is that they stuck a step (stair-like terrain) or a slope into each one without fail, so most of the medium-sized areas are effectively split up and made to feel small. For example, take the area in the Windward Plains with three Sharp Crystal Pillars that I used a lot around launch. I still don’t understand why they mixed step terrain into the middle of it. Now there’s the Seikret, so you can mount a monster regardless of the terrain by doing a jump attack from the Seikret, and about two of those were enough to mount it. I think that went too far.

The last of the cons is difficulty. This is a problem shared not only by Monster Hunter but by action RPGs and Soulslikes in general. If you design the game around people who’ve been trained by the earlier series, newbies get wiped out, and if you design it around newbies, it ends up too easy for the people who already play. Considering that casual players often stop playing after only seeing the story, I think an easy story is good. Monster Hunter already has inputs to learn on top of everything. But in my opinion, the Tempered monsters that open up from Hunter Rank 41 were also too easy. Back in World, there were a lot of posts saying it was too easy and that people were going to Double Cross. So my guess is that when the current game is easy, quite a few people go back to the previous game’s Master Rank (G-Rank), as far as I know. This time, it felt like the company was saying, “If you’ve got complaints, go back to the previous game’s Master Rank.”

The first of the mixed items is whether Elder Dragons appear. Opinions will be split, but I was fine with there being no Elder Dragons. The game can’t implement them as their lore describes anyway, and the only meaningful difference with Elder Dragons is that they don’t get caught in traps, so my position is that the design of the monster’s patterns is what matters.

As for the guaranteed rare-drop quests, I was fine with them. But now, in TU2 they changed it so that the guaranteed quests no longer show up for the regular versions of Lagiacrus and Seregios and only show up for the Tempered ones, and then, maybe because another wave of feedback came pouring in, they disappeared altogether. I understand the argument from the side that wants them gone. The argument is that farming until the rare material drops, getting used to the monster’s patterns and getting a feel for the weapon controls along the way, was the structure of the game. That’s a fair point, but I remember running a dozen-plus hunts in World just to get the Legiana Gem, and it wasn’t pleasant. If I add some guesswork, I also have a theory that’s pure speculation on my part: that, like Zoh Shia, Gogmazios was probably originally designed to appear during the Oilwell Basin’s Inclemency.

The last one is the Seikret’s auto-movement. I like it. I think it has more gains than losses: it automatically tracks the monster for you during combat, and in the field it takes you to a set destination automatically. As far as I know, a lot of the people who don’t like it say that the fun of exploring the map yourself is gone, and I think that also has plenty of merit.

That’s my summary of the pros, cons, and mixed points I could think of for the launch period. Some have been resolved and some haven’t.