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Monster Hunter: Wilds (Or: The Difficulty Paradox)

Alright, new year, new blog, let's start with something easy.

[Monster Hunter: Wilds proceeds to take over my brain and ignite really complicated thoughts about difficulty and accessibility]

Ah shit.

Monster Hunter is paradoxically an incredibly easy series to talk about and an incredibly difficult one. The premise and gameplay loop are both so simple that they're handily exposited by the title and there's a very handy educational video for those still struggling with the concept. It is a series where you, indeed, hunt monsters and turn their parts into equipment that helps you hunt better. This easy to digest concept is almost assuredly what made the series take off in the first place, but it belies an unsung depth to the combat system. Much like a fighting game, being good at Monster Hunter involves both reaction and action. You don't just need to push those buttons goodily, you need to actually know the monster, as they all have bespoke tells for which attacks are coming, status effects they can apply, some have environmental interactions, and all of them have parts of their body that take more or less damage than the others.

Describing it in text makes it sound more complicated than it is, in part because Monster Hunter's core strength is that it's all intuitive. There's no need to pore over menus to find out Gravios' weakspots because you as a player have likely tried to hit his legs, seen a weapon with Blue sharpness bounce, and immediately realized that you're not going to get through that fight playing anklebiter. Damage numbers are helpful but they're less helpful than the experience of getting off a fully charged Mighty Swing attack with a Hammer and seeing a once-fearsome monster drop to the floor like a club-goer that accepted a mysterious unmarked pill. To further the Fighting Game comparison: I played a lot of Kazumi in Tekken 7. She has this move that throws a tiger (an actual tiger, yes) at the opponent and it's a fantastic learning tool. It comes out fast and hits really hard and she recovers quickly enough from it that, while you're staggered, she can rush in and immediately start a full combo. It's an exceptional move to start a fight with, right? Well, kinda. See, the way to counter this move is simple. So simple that it immediately filters the lowest of the low out from people that have potential to go far. To defeat Kazumi's mighty tiger move, you simply... Move to the side. Yeah just a little bit. It leaves her wide open and gives you basically 6-7 years to walk up and start a combo.

Monster Hunter is much the same. The tail swipe attack endemic to the Rath- genus of monsters is pretty intimidating until you recognize that the windup for it can be measured in phone numbers, and at any point during that wind up you can move to the side a little bit. It's a dodge window for aspiring players and a flash bomb window for grizzled ones. It's all, ultimately, just knowlege checks. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire but the prize is a gimp suit and a musketeer's hat.

It's a very nice hat, at least.

Of course, like any series known for its difficulty - deserved or not - Monster Hunter hasn't survived contact with the mainstream, but up until now the attempts to level the playing field have been what I'd call fair. World greatly expanded weapon movesets and functionality but with the caveat that you still had to hit these moves; easier said than done in most cases. Iceborne added a Wounding system for players to deal more damage, on the condition that the player somehow grapple onto a monster, do an attack, and see that attack to completion all without being thrown off by a giant beast which is explicitly trying to kill you. Rise and its expansion added Wirebugs for mobility, flashier special attacks (many of which are ripped from Generations) and a quick recovery from knockbacks. The condition being that Wirebugs are a resource to be gained and spent, and that the player never has enough to be able to do everything Wirebug-related at any given moment and that using a Wirebug Recovery can and often will send you into the path of another attack.

The underlying theme of all these additions is actually needing to land the added moves or use them with any intentionality. They're the ideal additions to a franchise like this; they lower the floor and raise the ceiling. Everyone loves True Charged Slash and I'm no exception.

So it pains me to say that Wilds' additions are the bad kind of difficulty concession. Deeply destructive in ways that are going to inform future entries and, more importantly, collapse the skill ceiling onto the skill floor. Iceborne's implementation of Wounds and the Clutch Claw were immediately contentious, prompting the team to take note of this and... Uhm... Remove the need to land a mounting attack...? Wounds appear normally after successive attacks from any source, and where they were once relegated to a few weapons for balance's sake (ostensibly) they're now available to everypony. This would be bad enough on its own - Wounds confer significnatly lowered damage resistance and allow for much faster, easier stuns and kills - but the developers opted to sweeten the pot by adding Focus Attacks, which 'destroy' a wound in exchange for massive damage, a guaranteed stun or even a guaranteed knockdown. This doesn't sound too bad on paper, I'll admit, but it must be noted that wounds appear so frequently regardless of weapon that I initially thought they were bugged. This creates a knock-on effect where a monster gets a wound, is Focus Attacked, and is vulnerable just long enough to accumulate more wounds. It's a cycle of hurting that doesn't abate in High Rank.

I could forgive those, though. Focus Mode? Now that I can't forgive.

There's a nice dichotomy in this series between the close-range weapons that can more easily retarget their attacks mid-combo, and the longer range & heavier weapons where spacing and positioning are important because you get no do-overs. The Greatsword is a favourite of players like me who love to live on the edge because none of its attacks allow you to safely dodge and doing a full combo is a commitment that requires setup. Focus Mode's utility would be trivial in another game but is outright destructive and harmful to the act of playing the game, to the point where post-launch additions are deliberately overtuned to account for it and wounding. Focus Mode... allows you to aim your attacks. This would be quaint in some other game but in Monster Hunter it's akin to turning on cheats.

What the game doesn't necessarily tell you is that Focus Mode not only allows you to aim your attacks, but do so mid-combo with a full 360 degree range of movement. It turns already easy weapons like the Longsword and Sword & Shield into monstrosities, and harder weapons like the Hammer, Charge Blade and especially Greatsword into unparalleled death dealers that have little in the way of risk and require basically no commitment whatsoever to deal damage. Greatsword's True Charged Slash combo normally requires you to execute a Charged Slash, a Strong Charged Slash and finally a True Charged Slash, though you can skip the second one with a Tackle. These moves are slow to charge, don't come out particularly fast, can only be aimed very slightly to the left and right, and have incredibly long recovery frames. In Wilds, you can do 360 degree turns with each attack. This isn't hyperbole, or exaggeration; free-aiming arguably makes Greatsword more of an offensive monster than both the much-dreaded Longsword and the monsters themselves. Risk and commitment have both been sent to the gulag.

My actual issue with these isn't that they make the game easy, though. I'm a huge fan of Rise and its expansion, both of them are easy as sin. No, my actual problem is that they're bad for the game health. I alluded to it up above, but Focus Mode and Wounds are the kind of 'accessibility' systems that become elephants in the room. Post-launch content is already so overtuned that even Mizutsune, an early addition, barely develops any wounds and can oneshot Hunters through upgraded armor. I'm told that later content is worse. But for the purpose of 'accessibility', it's a game development nightmare. The systems either vanish, and those players you onboarded with them are now left up shit creek without a paddle, having to learn how to fight late-game monsters with weapons that were mostly guided by what amounts to autoaim. Alternatively, you keep the systems, and now need to balance the entire game around them. We're already seeing this with the aforementioned post-launch content, can you imagine an entire game developed as a response to this one? Horrifying. All the handwringing oldheads did about Rise's Wirebugs ended up a fart in the wind in comparison.

It may seem like I'm an embittered oldhead, mad at a series I once enjoyed for its difficulty kowtowing to the ghost of "casuals", but the real problem is less about difficulty and moreso about accessibility. Focus Mode is very plainly an attempt to onboard players who booted up World or Rise, missed a Spirit Roundslash in the first hunt, and uninstalled. It's the kind of metrics-brain that you only get when someone asks "Can we get more sales than World?" without being challenged. This isn't inherently wrong but that this has taken precedent over actual accessibility options - audio cues, a way to bypass the game's god-awful visual readability, font sizes, etc - is kinda bleak. Wilds is not a beautiful game, deeply taxing on a hardware side despite being only marginally more impressive than World, and its ugliness actually gets in the way of the gameplay.

If you think it's bad in image form, imagine it covered in framegem/upscaler smearing and TAA ghosting.

I've taken potshots at the previous two games for being fairly desaturated and I'm recanting those here and now. Wilds is not only ugly, it's borderline monochromatic. One area is bright brown, the other is beige, the other is dark brown, the other is a pale blue, and there's one that's just the arena from World. An overcommitment to 'detail' leaves every environment simultaneously overdesigned yet flavourless. World was already pushing the envelope in terms of acceptable detail for a game where you're meant to focus on what's in front of you and it seems positively ascetic in comparison. The screenshot above shows off how much the game has a borderline fetishistic obsession with foliage, environmental detail, and other stuff that gets smeared when the camera moves from right to left. As a series renowned for its distinct and visually striking areas, Wilds' fixation on detail has the depressing knock-on effect of simply making everything blend together. When they're not just repeating visual motifs from World they're dousing already banal locals in so much Stuff that the only way I can tell them apart is by their colour grading. And I'm colourblind, so.

What's especially vexing is the lighting. I wouldn't usually get this granular about technical stuff but in Wilds it's a problem. Monsters aren't particularly well lit in this game, whereas even the prior two titles would give them a lot of rim lighting to make them visible in the depths of a giant necrotic digestive system. There's no such luxury here, and in the Ruins of Wyveria area I've frequently seen Blangongas and Gypceros' disappear against the colour grading & environment combined. In past games I used the lock/targeting ability for really sweaty, high-end fights and this time I used it just so I could see where the thing I'm trying to kill actually is.

And believe me, there are a LOT of reused visual motifs from World.

Underscoring all of this is the actual geometry of each zone, which I suspect the developers gave up on once they finished designing the Seikret. Iceborne introduced Raider Rides which provided a taxi to a specific location. These were convenient but importantly they were a reward for bothering to explore and map out each zone. Rise introduced Palamutes, mounts that could be controlled directly, allowed you to use whetstones while moving, and even helped out in fights but were inferior to Palicos as far as pure utility goes, had to be geared up, and occupied the same slots. A key part of these two features is that they make you... You know. Play the game. Learn the maps. Raider Rides are taxis sure but they're taxis to places you've already been because you don't even get to sniff them until you've gone deep into a zone. Palamutes allowed for swifter travel but it was purely manual. They both ultimately tied into one of the core parts of Monster Hunter: Explore the maps, learn them, and understand them.

Seikrets? They're the best of both worlds and a permanent part of your toolkit, buddy.

Seikrets automatically taxi you to anywhere on the map (monsters included), carry a spare weapon so you can switch out if needed or desired, allow you to use whetstones and indeed any consumable while in motion, permanently follow you around, don't take damage, are a much faster mode of movement than your stupid human legs, allow you to (partially) use ranged weapons from them, and as a cherry on top don't need to be geared or upgraded or... Anything, really. They dont even take up a Palico slot! Unfortunately, unlike Palamutes, the game is almost wholly designed around Seikrets. I'm normally a devout practitioner of "you control the buttons you press" but traversing Wilds' regions on foot is pure misery. Rise despite its scale was very much a game you could traverse on foot but Wilds has succumbed to Open World Bloat so you might as well get riding. Further to the whole difficulty thing, the Seikret removes the Commitment part of several actions that required, well, committing to. If you forget to eat a Steak before a hunt you can simply hop on the Seikret and munch it while moving too fast to be damaged. Weapon run out of Sharpness? Jump on your Seikret and either swap it out or sharpen it. Need to do a BIG drinky from your Mega Potion? Seikret. Safely lure a monster to an environment trap? Seikret. Run away from Alma after failing a speech check and asking her if you can "hit it from the back Mezeporta Style"? Seikret. Need materials? Waypoint, Seikret, Slinger.

The vexing part of all of this isn't even their inclusion or what they do for the game. It's that, by and large, they don't work.

I try not to discuss difficulty too much in my reviews because I am keenly aware that there is a huge gap between mediocre players and the average person who buys game, and that there's an even further gap between mediocre players and me. With Wilds, I wrote all that out and thought to myself: "You know what? Let's check out some newbie videos". I mean real newbie videos. 6 views, 0 subscribers Youtube videos from people whose attempts to gain an audience are almost biblical in their fruitlessness. I kept these videos on the side while doing other stuff as research, and... It doesn't work. All those concessions for new players don't work. They're not using them. I have seen grown adults start sharpening a Whetstone in front of a Rathalos, standing still as it winds up for its overlong tail swipe, get hit by it, and exclaim "BRO HOW DID THAT HIT ME". I've watched as people whiff Greatsword/Charge Blade attacks that Focus Mode would've saved and complain about it. I even saw one person wish that they could pick up materials from a distance as a prompt that may as well say "CIRCLE: PICK UP ITEM AT RANGE" flashes on screen. The devs have lowered the bar to hell and people are still crawling under it.

Something I, and I assume everyone else online, forgets is that the mere act of seeking out community to talk about a game makes you markedly more invested in games than the average person playing them. It is incredibly easy to approach game difficulty from a pedagogical angle, futilely discussing teaching in ignorance of the fact that the average person is not willing to be taught. Everything I've just referenced, every little thing that 'lowers the skill floor', is going unused. I suddenly understand why everyone I've ever met who oversaw focus testing speaks in a cadence that betrays deep spiritual burnout. So... Fuck it, I guess.

As far as attempts to be more conventionally compelling go, I'll be honest and say that I don't hate the story. Yeah, really. It's nothing to write home about but after decades of loose allusions to "preserving the ecosystem" and similar concepts, it's nice to actually see that implemented. I never thought I'd say this, but I'll hide spoilers under a tag.

Spoilers Under The Cut

Thematically, the Guardians pose a pretty heavy question for an organization like the Guild: What do you actually do when the ecosystem itself begins to tear itself apart? They're artificial life sure but they're still life. They're essentially all that remains of ancient Wyveria and yet they're deeply destructive. They kill and maim other creatures, but they neither create life nor enhance it. Guardians have one natural Predator and Xu Wu is explicitly stated to be a strange evolution. In ecological terms it's essentially the biological equivalent of undetonated ordinance. The Guild's focus as an organization is on preserving the balance of an ecosystem, and the Guardians are a total left-fielder on that front. Now, obviously this is Monster Hunter so you're gonna kill them anyway, but the conflict facing the Avis Unit and their allies is decently compelling. It helps that this entry establishes the Guild as having a strict non-interference clause that prohibits them fucking around with territory outside their banner, meaning that much of the gang's goals are aiding in local traditions without usurping, supplanting or violating them. Alma being more active as a handler gives her much more presence than her predecessors which is aided by her being both unfailingly cute and kinda saucy with the way she dolls out authorizations as though she truly were handling you.

You're gonna hear "Wyvern Milk" a lot. Yes, that's what it's called.

Nata, though, sadly stands out as being deeply emblematic of the story's problems. He's meant to be an audience surrogate, here to ask newcomer-friendly questions like "why don't we just stab this monster to death?" and be answered in kind. He's a child sure but unfortunately his main contribution to the story is waxing poetic. He finds out that the Keepers (the organization his family belong to) functionally imprisoned the Guardians and that Guardian Arkveld - this game's Flagship - broke free out of madness, prompting him to start navel-gazing about how he too just wants to be free, to see the world, to eat freely and to live. This would maybe work in another Monster Hunter title but he's saying this about what's functionally a battle tank. Nata does this a lot to the point where it starts feeling like parody, and while High Rank is lighter on story they still make time for him to get philosophical about the Real Arkveld. I try to engage with stories on their own merits but here... Yeah no sorry, I was absolutely thinking "Shut up and let me turn this thing's decapitated head into a mace" the entire time

The Avis Hunter authorizing themselves to kill Zoh Shia as a way to break the "Save the cool tech but kill everyone, or destroy it to kill Zoh Shia" deadlock was cool though. I'm not immune to a good Proof Of A Hero moment.

End Spoilers

The bigger problem with the story is its implementation. World was already rife with walk-and-talk segments and Wilds is markedly worse on that regard. These segments not only take up a lot of time but enforce a lot of forced teleportation, oftentimes after a hunt - a time when most players want to rush over to the Blacksmith to make some new gear. Whether a hunt will deposit you in a random corner, a hub area, a village or even a consecutive monster fight is a total diceroll. More jarringly, the story can and will move NPCs around, often putting either Alma (the human-sized quest board) or Gemma (the Blacksmith) somewhere inconvenient, or even remove them from the game world entirely.

Get used to this until the credits roll, buddy.

Writing this all out has made me realize that constantly moving Alma and Gemma might actually be a worse sin than any of the mechanical changes. A huge part of the gameplay loop, regardless of entry, is putting the 'main quest' on hold for a few hours to go off and beat a dragon with a railgun to death 5-6 times until you can make armor out of their corpses. Randomly taking your gals away gets in the way of both hunting and crafting, and frustrated me more than any of the more tangible gameplay changes. When I reached High Rank I breathed a sigh of relief for no other reason than that Alma and Gemma would be in reliable places.

Fashion is both king and queen now.

I've grumbled about the game so much that I feel like it's worth noting that I don't hate it. It's profoundly hard to make a bad Monster Hunter and like the rest of them, Wilds is still decently satisfying to play. It has maybe the best roster of newcomers this franchise has ever had (beating out even its immediate predecessor, which is impressive) and being able to use the Male sets on a Female base and vice versa has done genuinely insane things to my desire to play it. No, really. I love playing dressup and being pretty, but oftentimes doing the latter locked you out of the former if you - like me - don't enjoy a lot of the skimpy armor sets. Those are still present but you can roll up in the other set or even mix and match them for maximum fashion. A bit like Final Fantasy XIV, fashion is my endgame here and it's better than ever. It helps that, on the whole, the armor sets for all those newcomers are obscenely pretty, and even the ones that aren't to my taste are more "not interested" than "who would ever wear this lmao". Good start.

Before performance was improved (not fixed; it's still kinda bad) I said that I probably wouldn't stick around for the inevitable Master Rank expansion. Afterwards, and after giving the game a fair shake, I'll say that I'm willing to hear out the expansion. Do I have any predictions on whether or not it'll address any of my issues? Absolutely not. But I'll hear it out, at least.