Topic: Monster Hunter: World

@Haru17 The music and audio cues in Skyrim are great. They add to the immersion a lot IMO. Sound in general is an underrated and underutilized part of game development.

I'm not a fan of the show by any means, but I think this clip does capture how BOTW starts to feel after long playthroughs:

Still I think the adapting music is a great idea, it's just that having the same type of music throughout the game was definitely going to be annoying and underwhelming at some point.

@roy130390 Lol, I was definitely not a fan of Randy Newman when he played The Late Show.

And the GL gets....an exploding stick.

@Joeynator3000 Honestly, if a weapon is at least part sword it gets the coolest new stuff.
Long Sword? Literally a Brave stance counter and a built-in HA.
Charge Blade? Can overcharge the sword mode and increased mobility options, with the Ultra Burst no longer eating the shield charge.
Switch Axe? Phial Awakening, flashy new moves for both forms (including a fade-slash straight outta Frontier) and the ability to freely switch between them mid-combo.
Dual Blades? Cool new Demon Mode and flashy aerial attacks.
Sword and Shield? Can jump off monsters if it lands the charge attack, letting it do totally not Shoryugeki.

Heck, the Lance got the Frontier super guard on top of the forward hop and can more fluidly insert counters into its combos; GL just gets the forward hop and an exploding stick.

The Dual Blades and the Switch Axe are mostly visual / animation tweaks to set them apart from the Sword and Shield and Great Sword respectively. I don't know why this is a thing to be upset at, gunlance is changing more in World than it has in any of the other recent games — it's changed that much.

And I sincerely hope you're not pretending that Capcom is somehow plagiarizing themselves. After all, they own both teams. They obviously talked during development so the animations would feel similar, World just has a less restrictive implementation of a lot of those ideas and some new ones besides. The 4 year dev cycle puts World recent enough to have taken from Cross and old enough to have given Double Cross enough to make brave style out of.

In Generations it got a bunch of new attacks...a rocket boost forward followed by a slam. A super-nova-ish attack, and some max heating thingy I never used or care about. lol
Also all of the styles and stuff.

@Joeynator3000 The Heat Gauge was actually a nerf (as the motion values got dropped 15%-- unless you always stayed in the red, you were doing less damage than in the past) until XX reverted the MVs, but yeah the weapon gained a lot of cool stuff from arts and styles.

Disappointed that Blast Dash and/or the Adept counter didn't get incorporated into the moveset in anyway.

Blast Dash was fun, too.... :c
Ah well...I was fine with the heat gauge, though.

Yeah, I would have been happy had the blast dash stayed. I don't play gunlance, which the heat gauge and sharpness management in general haven't helped with, but that one was cool.

I like how the great sword looks now. It really feels like just the long sword and it were supposed to get those brave style dodge / i-frame moves, Double Cross just took that idea and gave it to every weapon. It's just too... too confusing to remember which animations are removed by which of the six styles for each of the 14 weapons. I'm glad we're returning to the simpler, more complete mainline Monster Hunter.

Well I hope they at least made blocking a more viable option. That God awful block stun and chip damage may not seem so bad until one takes on a brachydios with a strategy dedicated to blocking.

Like everyone else, I'm overall massively disappointed with World's Gunlance. --still going to play the duck out of it tho--

Edit: Dammit, that's embarrassing

More Edit: And you know what? That's another thing. Unblockable attacks just should not exist. Not to weapons with heavy shields anyways. It is unreasonably stressful to try and put away a massive cannon lance thing while a sweeping lasor beam is being prepared.

...I'm fine with blocking against Brachy with the GL....no idea what the issue is. lol

I kinda like that things like Nakarkos' 'charging my laser' attack are 1 hit KOs. Not so much Teostra's mandatory 'run out' or Rajang's screw attack, but as long as it's properly foreshadowed like Dalamadur's earth-chomping bite and hyper beam (the later of which wasn't even a 1HKO if you were wearing G gear — not even fully upgraded G-rank gear at that) I appreciate big set piece attacks that tie into a monster's identity. I don't play weapons with shields, but I think it's reasonable to expect them to get out of the areas of apparent absolute devastation certain monsters create.

Okay, I've got three bits of info: one good, one debatable, and one ugh.

The good: free hunt will be returning and on all maps.

The debatable: flash bombs are gone. Instead you have to use the environment (bugs/brightmoss). Thankfully, traps are still in and they've confirmed capture quests. Anyways, I actually kinda like this due to flash bomb spam being able to lock monsters down way too easily and in general feeling a bit cheap.

Now, for the ugh: potions only take two herb instead of herb + blue mushroom. They auto-combine in the pouch if you have the space (which also makes me think that combo rate is gone-- not something I'd bemoan, especially since with the Combo Books it was a non-existent factor outside of early game). Dumbing down the crafting system like this also makes think I was right on the money when I called out the Jagras GS taking far too few parts in the overview video.

@CrazedCavalier Being in orange, which is easy, gives you pretty much the same attack power as normal. It's only a nerf if you're really bad at managing it.

@Haru17 I'm pretty sure you can block Rajang's cannonball just fine, you just have to mind the little shockwave it creates and face it properly when not hit dead on. It's his trusty mouth laser that can't be blocked.

@CrazedCavalier You're taking the most basic combinable there is, one that can usually be bought regularly in a store anyway, and taking it as proof of dumbing down? It's not like Blue Mushrooms were any harder to find, and if anything having to double up Herbs could actually make it harder to keep a steady supply of potions, since you need to find way more of them, or dedicate more farm resources (if such a thing exists in World) to make them.

I don't care if Gunlance doesn't get anything particularly flashy. It only needs to do two things: stab weak points and blast anything that isn't one. This freedom in how it deals damage is what sells it to me. And it even kept Brave's ability to rapid-fire shells, no quick reloads or charging needed to get in the way, with an explosive stick finisher.

@meleebrawler We've already seen that weapon crafting takes far fewer materials; simplifying the most basic combination in the game would certainly point towards them dumbing it down overall. I'd love to be wrong, but I'm still skeptical of a lot of things.

@CrazedCavalier Interesting, I wonder how it will play most of all. I'll keep a keen eye out for PS4/Xbox One reviews and impressions, since I'm stuck waiting for the PC version anyway.

I agree that they can be misused, but flash bombs aren't gone — flash pods are crafted directly from flashbugs found in the environment and fired with the slinger (just like the dung bombs and scatternuts, which act like sonic bombs):

Honestly, free hunt is big for me. I'm so glad that I can explore presumably the entire game save for elder dragons after I've unlocked the areas. I wonder if the SOS flare works in free hunt or if you have to be on a quest.

I'm pretty indifferent about blue mushrooms. The material grind never bothered me in Monster Hunter 3, but it was frustrating in 4 and Cross when I would have to go grind honey or other potion materials in the middle of g rank. I think this change will make it easier for people to get into the series, but also help with some of the low tier material strain at high ranks.

So it looks like this game will still have its own flagship monster, and it looks like TGS will reveal it, so...yeah.