Topic: Monster Hunter Rise

I'm almost through with the four-star village quests now. Nothing has really killed me yet.

I also did that special license mission where it automatically promotes you to HR2. I actually fought the Rathian first there before in its proper story mission.

So far, I'm not seeing a reason to upgrade from my Izuchi armor set.

Ive been out of town for two days where I went to two Walmarts and even checked on the website for Target to see if any of the closest Targets had Monster Hunter Rise in stock.

Nada. Not a damn thing. Guess Ill have to buy Monster Hunter Rise off of the Switch eshop or wait a little bit more since next week im going out of town again and check the Target store one more time and maybe see if the Best Buy store would even have the damn game or not

....I kinda want to try the online, but keep it to friends only....ugh...
I got low rank hub quests to finish up before moving on to high rank. >.<

Just beat Magnamalo. First try. Nothing has killed me in this game thus far.

He makes up for his shrimpy size with a really powerful and hyper-aggressive moveset, and is the first of the beasties to really strike some level of apprehension in me. Pretty cool, intense fight.

I actually moved over to a set of fully upgraded Basarios gear just before fighting him. I'm guessing I would have carted a few times if I'd still been wearing my Izuchi set, lol.

17 hours of play time before I hit the credits. I'm guessing I won't be getting nearly as many hours out of this game as I did with MH4U.

So far, this game is pretty easy honestly. Haven’t been carted once, and I’m starting the third rank quests.

Village is supposed to be easy, the hub is where things get a little more challenging, even more so with high rank. That Apex Arzuros was a nightmare for me.

Apex Azuros is super fun in multiplayer. Rampages in general just are.

But yeah village quests are super easy.

My experience with Hub quests with randoms so far is, we bully the monster to death, haha. With a full room monsters die faster than me hunting alone, despite scaling.

@TeeJay
Ya, low rank village is easy, as was stated by the devs. World low rank was also easy, but Rise made Low Rank village a bit easier than that. Which I’m totally OK with because look how many new people are getting into monster hunter and actually sticking with it as a result. Social media is chock full of new players. Even Arlo is now addicted.

Even in the older games, for low rank you could basically make one armor set to last you the entire way through. I used Tetsucabra all throughout MH4U low rank, for example.

It’s... low rank. It’s just what it is.

That said, I carted yesterday to a freaking Tobi Kadachi. Got stunned in a combo and that tail slam got me.

@Ralizah
No, you’re never going to get anywhere close to the amount of hours that a full fledged ultimate edition with high rank village quests and G rank hub quests, tons of event quests and DLC will offer. There was never any hope of a freshly minted base version game comparing to an ultimate version. For that we’ll have to wait for the ultimate version and all title updates. Like World when it released, Rise will not compare to full G rank releases.

But it’s comparable with World base game. In fact, it actually has a couple extra monsters than World had at launch. A lot of it is just cutting out the downtime and filler. Ever since World, MH games are more streamlined and as such, don’t take as long. Rise will go even quicker with its faster traversal on Palamutes and cutting out searching for the monster each quest. But it’s a more pure, higher quality level of fun while playing. And that’s more preferable because when the game is this fun to play, I can literally just hunt monsters over and over and over without any aim or goal and probably get more time out of it as a result. 40 hrs in the demo, largely from one single quest, speaks to how fun it is just to fight monsters and explore in this game, and means the base game has limitless potential. Unless one isn’t looking for the fun of the experience and is B-lining for the end credits. Which, I’m not sure why someone would skip all that content just to rush to the end. Even the Hub Quest tests. I took them, but I’m skipping nothing. Hub quests is where the difficulty comes from. I’m not skipping any of that.

@JaxonH I did every Village quest before moving to the Hub but skipped straight to High rank Hub as I was ready to move onto some tougher fights at that point and wanted to unlock some of the better talisman melding and stuff. Played entirely solo until I finished all my High rank Urgents then moved onto multiplayer.

I think I'm finding multiplayer to be less fun than solo in this one though which is usually the opposite of what I'd expect from the series. It feels like there's a bit too much going on a lot of the time with four players and I just end up mashing away attacks, barely even able to see what I'm doing, until the monster swiftly dies. Maybe two players with a friend is the sweet spot, haven't gotten around to trying that yet.

@BenAV
Ya I can appreciate that. It is tempting to jump right in but I don’t want to miss out on content.

Multiplayer is a blast, but it can get busy on screen with 4 players. That’s always been the case in the series but it’s more noticeable in Rise because it has a lot more smaller monsters. The best thing you can do is go into the options and turn down the hit effects.

I’ve never been big into 4 player hunts unless it’s end game elder dragons. For the very reason you mentioned, and... it kinda makes it too easy (again, unless it’s end game elder dragons in G rank). I have always found 2 to 3 players to be the sweet spot. I’ll still do 4 player hunts in low/high rank because they’re still crazy fun. But I’ve always preferred 2-3 until end game.

@JaxonH Does turning down the hit effects make much of a difference? I did that hoping it'd really tone down on all the bright flashes but I couldn't even tell what changed. I'd like to see a side-by-side comparison of the two.

Two player co-op is usually ideal for me. You're working together as a team with someone.

Four people is... well, it was chaotic in MH4U, and I have to imagine it's that much worse in a game with palamutes and wirebugs. With that said, it might not be a bad idea for some late-game rampage quests, which I hear get pretty brutal.

Just beat Magnamalo, rolled credits and unlocked 5 star village quests. The tutorial is over. Now the real game begins 😊

This is true. I set my camera distance to 40 which is almost half ways in between, and it feels much closer to MHGU camera distance. Did the same thing in World, as that also had camera distance too close by default.

And ya, turning down hit effects helps. It’s not gonna make there be no flashes but it does remove blood and lower total screen effects below what we had in MHGU (which had the biggest flashes in the series) and MHW (which was chock full of particle effects, but larger monsters helped spread it out). I like it on full blast, but if I’m playing 4p I will turn it down..

Saw this on Reddit lol.

I don’t know if anybody else has had this, but once I beat the final hub quest (not gonna say the name) when I went and joined an online lobbie, the village and hub music was different, the village was I think the I don’t know how to not spoil it, but the six star rampage special monster fight theme, and the hub music was mizutsunes theme, but when I left the lobby to join a different one, the other one didn’t have the new music in the background. I just thought this was strange. Secondly, does anybody have it where all the stickers you can say online are now just blank white, nothing on them? Out of nowhere, every single one of mine turned white, so now I don’t even know if other people see them, nor do I know what they say if somebody else sees them.

I played a low ranked hub quest solo last night and I went right up to the time limit to defeat it. It was the giant bird monster, whatever his name is. I would beat on him, and then he would fly away to another part of map where I had to track him down to continue the fight. I fainted once because I wasn't paying attention and forgot to the heal. I had to have been seconds away from failing when I finally won. So while the game might be relatively easy for top tier players, for the rest of us, it can be a decent challenge.

My little cat is ready to shred

@Mountain_Man
That’s the give and take for games with high skill levels.

You either cater to long time skilled fans right off the bat and continue to alienate new players and watch the franchise remain stagnant, or attempt to walk that fine line between difficulty that’s still tough for newer players, and being easier yet still fun for long time players. World’s Low Rank quests were noticeably easier than I had been accustomed to in previous games. Their health pools were much lower and they did less damage. But that game didn’t separate offline village quests.

Rise is about the same as World in that respect, but the added mobility and palamutes takes a bit more of the edge off than World did. The result is the easiest off-line single player quests the series has had to date. But the result is also virtually everyone getting into the series now. Be it HeyJay!, PlayerEssence, MissClick, Spawnwave, DreamcastGuy, NintendoPrime, Arlo, Peer Schneider and Zach Ryan at IGN, and many, many more. Which is exactly what the goal was- make the franchise more popular, and lower that super high bar of entry enough new players can actually get into it and get addicted before giving up in frustration.

And that will result in more success and higher sales which ensures we continue to see the franchise grow, with higher budgets and future portable entries.

That said, they must cater toward long time fans also, and they are- high rank has normal difficulty you’d expect, for example. But the lack of elder dragons and a Deviljho/Bazelgeuse crashing your hunts really makes it feel like it’s missing that extra little bit of fear inducing monsters. Of course, we know Bazelgeuse is coming in a title update, although it might be the second one since the first is the trio of elder dragons and an apex or two. But yeah, it’s definitely hard to strike that right balance of difficulty where new players are challenged but not completely overwhelmed, and old players aren’t overly challenged but it’s still engaging for them. At least until High Rank where, by that point, even the new players have started to develop their skill set enough the difficulty can ramp up.

But Master Rank and the Ultimate expansion is really specifically designed to target the veterans such as myself. Whenever I play MH games, I consider Low and High ranks to be a fun time experiencing all the monsters, but it’s not until G rank with elder dragons and late game monsters that my skills start getting pushed to the limits. And the fact is, I and many of the other veterans will have to wait until the ultimate expansion to get that kind of fix. Or at least, until late game High Rank, and the soon-to-be released Elder Dragons and Apex monsters from title updates.

I don't actually like a lot of the felyne armors. The little cats are adorable, but a lot of the armors make them look rather ugly.

I second this. I’ve been breezing through hunts since using the Switch Axe @Northwind

...I'm annoyed that you can't use any armor as layered armor...like, you know...in GU. :/
All the layered armor I've seen in the 5th gen games are just...meh.