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Monster Hunter Rise Discussion (Nintendo Switch) [game]
 
Monster Hunter Rise on the Switch
8.45/10 from 4 user ratings

Welcome to the official discussion thread for Monster Hunter Rise on the Switch!

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01/08/21, 06:15  
 
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ludist210 said:
Tomorrow y'all. Mine's pre-loaded and ready to go. Who else is getting this?
Me!

(going in mostly blind as well, we'll see how that goes)
03/26/21, 02:47   
I got it, but haven't opened it yet. Today!
03/27/21, 15:22   
BTW everyone who wants to play this should really check out our Discord channel. We set up a lot of multiplayer gaming on there, and sometimes use it to chat during games too because you know, there is no real voice chat solution on the Switch.
03/27/21, 21:07   
I can't believe how bad the tutorials are in this ostensibly professionally developed game that sells millions of copies. Could someone just send Kojima over there and show them what to do? Or just any random indie developer off the street?

I would refund the game just out of principle if I could. But I can't, so I guess I'll stick with it in hopes that the meat of the game that everyone loves so much is worth it. But this opening is causing me a non-zero amount of mental anguish, AND YOU SHOULD ALL BE ASHAMED.
03/28/21, 06:53   
Played a couple levels in Mario 3D World to cleanse my palate and hopped back in. And, hmmm...

Anand said:
You seem to prefer games that have a sense of place and atmosphere.

Going between 3D World and Monster Hunter has made me realize something. I really do value games that have a sense of place.

In 3D World, everything is immediate, and the game teaches you through play. There is a specific canonical experience that Nintendo designed for you to have. You turn the game on and enter its universe. Everything is beautiful, everything is narratively justified, and you never stop playing.

I've always taken this type of design as self-evidently good, which is why I really dislike games that are overly chatty and have too many tutorials and options. Every little external thing is detracting from the purity of the experience. This is where I'm coming from when I argue against easy modes or alternate graphical settings; the second you add those sorts of user-defined parameters, well, you're now a product that uses the term "user-defined parameter." You're not a portal into a consistent universe anymore. You're software.

And Monster Hunter goes so far in the software direction that I'm just now for the first time realizing that developers who can't capture the magic of Mario 3D World aren't incompetent, they're just... not even trying to optimize for magic at all. When you join a new social network or learn a new programming language, you aren't taken by the hand and shown the beauty of a new world. You're just kinda onboarded with some text boxes, and then you figure out the rest feature-by-feature as you need to. The software itself isn't meant to be beautiful, it's just a vehicle for Doing Things.

This seems to be Monster Hunter's design philosophy, where Doing Things in this case is Hunting Monsters. This is Monster Hunting Software. It's more of a tool than a universe. Of course there's an instruction manual to read. What, did you think learning what to do here was gonna be fun?

And I do think this is a mistake. We should prioritize magic and beauty more in life. I believe that those are moral goods.



But I also understand that, for a lot of people, these types of games really are more like platforms than stories. Fortnite is the most innovative social network of the past ten years. Is it beautiful? Not really. It's filled with menus and microtransactions and XP, which is why I've always avoided it. But as a vehicle for social interaction, I get it. Even for single player games, a lot of people play "on" them rather than "in" them. That's the otaku mindset; you spend 100 hours learning Monster Hunter so that you can spend a thousand more hours "using" it as a platform for Monster Hunting.

I'm not intending to describe this mindset in a judgmental way, but I don't have the language to distinguish the two types of games I'm talking about from each other very well, and as I go back and re-read my post, I find that I don't really disagree with its mildly judgmental tone. I feel like David Lynch struggling to articulate why he needs more time to film. "We never get to go dreamy with it. It's sick, this fuckin' way to do it... you don't get a chance to sink into anything."



...anyway, haha. I get where the Monster Hunter "games as software" mindset is coming from. But one of my big theses guiding the work I'd like to do in life is that all software should feel as magical to use as a Nintendo game does. (Bret Victor's work in this area is excellent.) So if there are games out there that are optimizing more for being a Platform than for being Magical, well, that's not the worst thing in the world, it's just the same misguided mindset that all software is made with. And I've learned to deal with using bad software every day in order to get stuff done, so a game being bad too doesn't have to stop me from deriving some utility from it.

What I'm trying to say is, it's not like Monster Hunter is any more of an abomination than Visual Studio.
03/28/21, 09:11   
I got it, played some single player, played some multi with randos. Seems ok although I remember liking Tri but I forget what made it stand out, so far it feels pretty basic. Just running at stuff and killing it. But there is more to it too, right? Like having to actually stalk and hunt and use scents and traps and such?

WHEN WE HUNTIN'?!

BTW having 2 AI helpers per player = 12 characters per squad all jamming into a tiny space when you're all up close fighting a monster and boy is that CHAOS. I can't even tell where I am half the time!
03/28/21, 21:57   
Edited: 03/28/21, 21:58
@Zero When you play multiplayer you can take only one helper with you, not both. You can choose which one to take with you at the Buddy Board.

A lot of people on my friend list have this game, so my rooms are usually full. Might be tricky to play with NW folk for a while,
03/28/21, 22:57   
@Secret_Tunnel
Strong words! Comparing any game to 3D World's effortless elegance would be tough, and Monster Hunter has a certain amount of clunk in its DNA. But the world and lore is probably a lot more cohesive than 3D World's.

I haven't jumped in yet (still trying to decide between physical and digital), but is Rise really so opaque, after having played the demo?

Nintendo actually went way more minimalist and less toylike with the Switch UI. It's kind of sad.

But it's hella snappy!
03/29/21, 02:05   
Played through all of the 1 Star requests in the village and a couple of two stars. Having not played World, there's a few QoL things I like, such as auto-crafting (and setting it up to turn that on and off for each recipe). I do also like the help of the Palamute, and the freakin' Wirebug adds so much depth to the world! Takes some getting used to, but I sure dig it.

Zero said:
BTW everyone who wants to play this should really check out our Discord channel.
I've tried pulling that link down several times, but I can never get it to work...
03/29/21, 15:35   
We are a tight-knit group...


...and we're all about eating and having a good time!

03/29/21, 19:07   
Edited: 03/29/21, 19:07
@ludist210 Does this work? I don't actually understand how to link to a Discord channel.

Here is an invite link if you need one.
03/29/21, 22:16   
Got up to HR3 in the village. Woot at fun Switch Axe weapons and armor builds!

@Zero That worked. I needed the invite. Thank you!
03/30/21, 15:50   
Dual blades rule.

Question though... when does the single player get challenging? I'm at 2 star stuff and just breezing through everything without any real effort put in. I vaguely remember Tri got tough at a certain point.
03/31/21, 02:38   
@Zero

Dual blades do rule. It's hard to justify swapping them out for something else, but I do want to start experimenting with more weapons soon.

I'm almost done with the 2* quests and I also think it's been pretty easy. I feel like World was more challenging at this same stage, but it's also possible that it's because I had no idea what I was doing back then.
03/31/21, 16:01   
But I have no idea what I'm doing! I played some of Tri so I have a small clue, but I'm more or less a noob.

A lot of the missions so far seem to just be run to the circles on the map and either collect things or kill super, super easy enemies. I finish a lot of them without even getting hit once. The few boss fights I have done felt a little more intense but even then, I was rarely in any real danger.

I hope it picks up eventually because I just kind of feel like I'm going through the motions...
03/31/21, 18:44   
@Zero

Heh. I was trying to chalk it up to having a MH game under my belt now, but you may be right regardless.

I do think things like Wirebug attacks, wyvern riding and Switch Skills make the large monster hunts go faster and more efficiently. I know that in MH:World my first few large monster hunts were taking much longer than 5-10 minutes. Mind you, I see these as improvements. I'm certainly having a lot more fun taking down large monsters, and I feel a lot more effective with these additional abilities.
03/31/21, 21:59   
@Zero Monster Hunter games have been getting progressively easier since MHTri, it's one of the ways they've been trying to widen the audience for the series (and finally succeeded with MHWorld). If Rise follows World's pattern, then any tough stuff will likely be in the form of "post-game" content, and / or added later in updates / DLC. The multiplayer quests are also usually harder than the single-player stuff, though if you have a group of 4 prepared players then they can still be pretty easy. They also now scale monster HP to the number of players in the quest, so taking on multiplayer quests with less players or solo is no longer much of an extra challenge.
03/31/21, 22:09   
Hmm, that's a bit disappointing. There is no difficulty switch or anything? I don't need super hard but like I said, I'm not even really getting hit most missions. It's like baby mode.

I guess I could do what I often do in these cases and add artificial difficulty by not upgrading my gear until I start to struggle...
04/01/21, 01:05   
Edited: 04/01/21, 01:06
Having gotten to 4star village quests, I can confirm it is getting more difficult (for me at least) in the single player campaign.

Playing online is a blast. I like how you can just drop into a quest that's already started!
04/01/21, 17:58   
@TheOldManFromZelda

Oooh, that's new!
04/01/21, 18:14   
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