Monster Hunter and Monster Hunter: Iceborne ... What kind of game is it?

[jjs82x]

Have seen this advertised, off and on, for what seems like years. Somehow got "Souls like" associated with it, in my mind, which did not entice me to further explore the game description. Finally looked at it after seeing MH2 in my feed; and am toying with the thought of getting MH:W Iceborne Deluxe.

So I watched the videos, read the descriptions and some reviews, and still can't quite figure out what is going on. Questions:

1.a. Does this game have an ending? Or is it crafted to be an endless MMO like TESO or WOW?
1.b. If it does an ending, about how many hours to get to that ending, if not rushing (I like to enjoy my games) and not a completionist?

2. Is it a twitchy-fingered reflex game, or can it be enjoyed by someone who does not have above average reflexes?

3. Does having a team make it easier to progress; and, if so, is it easy to find an adhoc team?

4. I see about $500 of DLC. Is this game PTW? or pay to not grind, or otherwise pay to reasonably enjoy?

Thank you.

[Seamus]

1a: While there is an ending, that's not really the point of the game. You'll hit it long before you run out of game content.

1b: As for hours? Depends how good you are and how much time you spend grinding. I've put around a thousand hours into the game myself. I know people with over 3k.

2: The combat is pretty deliberate. You'll need to learn patterns and tells, but it's not overly fast.

3: Finding random people to play with is reasonably easy due to the SOS system, but, you're generally better off not using it early on to learn the mechanics.

4: No. With the exception of iceborne and the soundtracks, that's all cosmetic garbage and can be safely ignored.

[Seamus]

Oh right. Game type.

Monster Hunter is at its core, a single player action game where you go out on timed quests. Mostly to either kill or capture a particular monster.

Kill/capture the target, make equipment out of its parts, move on to the next target.

There's multiplayer, and it's fun to play with other people, but, with a couple exceptions, everything scales based on player count. Don't need other people, really.

Again, with exceptions. That can be counted on one hand.

[𝓇𝒾𝓃𝒶]

MH is not like souls, this has a bit more of strategy than just quick reflexes. It's like a waltz between you and the monster, when it does x you respond. It's a good game but make sure your pc can handle it as the port was done a bit poorly.

[Greb]

1a - not really, it has a story in lieu of quests called "Assignments" and "Special Assignments" which have an excuse plot and a generic storyline associated with them, but they largely function as a way for the game to introduce you to new monsters, areas, mechanics and such. It's a tutorial, essentially. The main game is from the optional content.

1b - everyone moves at their own pace. I took forever because I decided I'd make every single armour piece and also make sure I made all of a specific weapon type, and I also liked to grind out a few things which made my life easier later on. However, considering there's something like 25 "main quests" each with a time limit of 50 minutes (which is realistically way more time than you'll need) to complete them, plus a bunch of unskippable cutscenes, so I guess you could put a timeframe on it...but really, not really.

2 - combat is different based on the weapon you use, and the monster you fight. Some monsters are slow, some are huge, some are small, some are fast, etc. Likewise some weapons are mobile, some weapons are fast, some weapons are slow, etc. All monsters attack without tracking or anything, likewise with weapons, so positioning is very important, as once an attack begins it's "locked in" of sorts. I wouldn't consider it twitchy-reflexy to a point, but having good timing with dodges and being attentive and reacting to what the monster is doing is always a plus.

3 - you can use the SOS flare to summon people into your quest, or use the quest board to join other players who have fired an SOS flare in their quests, you can also find sessions with a specific target monster or objective and hope the people in them are happy enough to oblige you. Bringing your own group of friends is generally the better option though - also the main story has some weird thing where only you can join the quest initially until you unlock the option within the quest to enable SOS multiplayer, a little bit counter intuitive but remember the main story is not the bulk of the game and the rest of it doesn't have this weird limitation / quirk.

4 - DLC is mostly bloated cosmetic stuff, which Capcom used generally to pay for all the free content they added over the years. Major updates and monster additions, not including Iceborne (which also got its own content updates) were all free too. You're not forced in any way to buy any of the DLC, of which there's a lot - it's entirely up to you and doesn't have any bearing on the game itself.

[jjs82x]

Thank you, Seamus! You are 5 for 5 on clearly answering the questions.

I have a follow-up: So you hit the single player end of game before end of content. So that is the main story arc, supported by all that video I see in the previews, right? And roughly how many hours to get to the end of that story arc (for an average gamer)? Dozens of hours? Scores? Hundreds? Just looking for a rough idea. Whatever you tell me the averaqe is, I'll double it for myself, since I approach things slowly and methodically.

Thanks again.

And thank you, Sweet Tea. I get it, you need to understand the monster's fight pattern, anticipate and make the right pattern of moves in response. Sort of short pattern memorization, rather than quick reflexes. And I read elsewhere that the monsters give you indications of what is coming, with the harder monsters giving you less forewarning.

[Seamus]

Uh, base game can be 20+ hours if you do JUST story quests. Longer is probably more common.

As a note, the intro to the game is pretty long, and the cutscenes in it are unskippable, which can make getting started a bit annoying.

But as Greb pointed out, the story really isn't the meat of the game. It's investigations, event quests, general farming, coming up with gear sets, etc.

There's a lot of depth to be had when you've got 14 weapon types. Even if heavy bowgun and light bowgun are similar, they're still used fairly differently.

[jjs82x]

Thank you for the follow-up, Seamus. So, based on what I think I know about the game, and what Greb just wrote, I would guess 60-80 hours for me.

Greb님이 먼저 게시:

...
1b - everyone moves at their own pace. I took forever because I decided I'd make every single armour piece and also make sure I made all of a specific weapon type, and I also liked to grind out a few things which made my life easier later on. However, considering there's something like 25 "main quests" each with a time limit of 50 minutes (which is realistically way more time than you'll need) to complete them, plus a bunch of unskippable quests, so I guess you could put a timeframe on it...but really, not really. ...

Okay Greb, you sound like my kind of player: maybe not a completionist, but someone willing to grind just a bit to make the later game a bit easier... I really identify with that playstyle. So, how many hours of play time do you estimate it took you to finish the (I guess introductory) story arc?

[Seamus]

Keep in mind, the expansion Iceborne also adds a third difficulty rank and more story in addition to the new features and monsters.

So, more, if you get the expansion too.

Definitely a game you can lose time to if you enjoy it.

[Chocbomb]

Chocbomb님이 먼저 게시:

jjs82x님이 먼저 게시:

1.a.
Story campaign single player thing does have an end.
Once you finish that end you open up the final area with MMO like endlessness with RNG for loot, unless you download some mods to fix that.
BUT you will be mucking around with their sh$t menu's for everything, you gota click like 4 windows of stuff to get into a multiplayer game and single player, and this is for every mission, whoever made the menu's for thing was a robot that had no heartbeat.
The revolver chamber action item belt is pretty fun, it almost gets you killed if you have alot of consumables.

1.b.
If you donot use the Guardian gear they give you to skip content then youre looking at months of hours 2-6 months, anyone who says less does not have a job.

2.
Yep it is a bunch of spacebar spamming to dodge roll, and the monsters sometimes skip actions and go right into blowing you up, but they also have stamina and fatigue, so you can wear them out with a weapon/element/palico/batmanutilitybelt.
I have met people who only play this for the sword and chopping off everyones tail.

3.
The multiplayer in this game is mental, in the way it was designed to be difficult to team up with people, you get given a weird ID that cannot be easily traded to people, your online presence is just a session that you can send out an SOS in a game or sit around waiting for the black text to tell you youre ready to standby to be ready then wait for everyone else to go through a bunch of buttons to search for your game because friends lists dont exist?
You have guild cards that do something, you can google many topics of people asking about them, it's still a mystery what and why they were made so limited.
People will eventually join your SOS tho, no one gets notifications with these so you gota hope someone was clicking, you have to click the button to search for SOS like an idiot, its got this in your face popup that locks you up to tell you there is nothing there.. lol then rightclick the popup that you need to close before doing anything else, so yeah not many ppl use it, they use 3rd party things like Discord to setup groups but still have to click those menu's.
IMO multiplayer was an afterthought with only the raw draft with pretty rectangles that they did not go back over once they got bored making the rectangle click game of menu multiplayer.


4.
Theyre cosmetics, you only really want Iceborne for the claw, they spent more time on making the little stringy thing that hangs off of your weapon or the floating things than they did making the menu clickathon for multiplayer.
When diablo3 has a better method of multiplayer.

Thank you.
np.

[jjs82x]

Seamus님이 먼저 게시:

Keep in mind, the expansion Iceborne also adds a third difficulty rank and more story in addition to the new features and monsters.

So, more, if you get the expansion too...

Oh yes, I mentioned that I would go for Iceborne (deluxe) if I bought; but then forgot about that in the discussion. So now my estimate is up to 100+ hours. Just like to know what I am getting into.

I will put this on my wish list and wait for the next sale. Appreciate the help all!

[Seamus]

That... certainly is a quote.

[Greb]

jjs82x님이 먼저 게시:

Okay Greb, you sound like my kind of player: maybe not a completionist, but someone willing to grind just a bit to make the later game a bit easier... I really identify with that playstyle. So, how many hours of play time do you estimate it took you to finish the (I guess introductory) story arc?

Wish I could give you a definite answer, but it's been too long. When I enjoy a game, and I definitely enjoyed Monster Hunter World, I tend to play in huge sessions that are at least 6+ hours long, according to my achievements I got my first one on the 9th of August and I finished the campaign storyline on the 14th of August, so if you assume I played every day (and I almost certainly did) for like 6 hours a day, that's 36 hours, give or take?

I know I'd learned from my past experience on the PS4 so I was coming into the PC version with some knowledge, but that was after like a whole year and I was also never particularly good on the PS4 version either lol. I was determined on the PC version to take it more seriously and play well, so I made sure I went around collecting like canteen ingredients, and doing Investigations instead of Optionals for monster parts, not to mention I actually cared about the Lynian stuff and the Piscine and Endemic researchers, stuff like that.

There's a whole bunch of optional stuff you can do, like delivery quests and the cunningly titled "Optional" quests, some of which offer some pretty important rewards for completion and also only unlock when specific circumstances are met, so speeding through only the game story will definitely make you miss a whole bunch of content, as I kind of ended up doing on the PS4.

I don't really wanna put a timeframe on it because everyone is different but I'll say the story took me anywhere from 30 to 50 hours to complete, maybe. I know you can blow through the entire thing much quicker than that if you rush it down and ignore everything else though.

[jjs82x]

Greb님이 먼저 게시:

...I tend to play in huge sessions that are at least 6+ hours long, according to my achievements I got my first one on the 9th of August and I finished the campaign storyline on the 14th of August, so if you assume I played every day (and I almost certainly did) for like 6 hours a day, that's 36 hours, give or take?...
I don't really wanna put a timeframe on it ... but I'll say the story took me anywhere from 30 to 50 hours to complete, maybe. I know you can blow through the entire thing much quicker than that if you rush it down and ignore everything else though.

I don't want to go quicker, probably slower; so I'll stick with an estimate of 60 hours for myself for MH:W , which I guess would translate to something like 100+ for MH:W IB.

Thanks for the data point, Greb!

[Greb]

Good luck and have fun for when you eventually pick up the game

It's a pretty unique game, I think it'll be fun regardless because of that.

[Definively Not Alchman]

so before anything, i think this video explains the mh experience and why people like it better than anyone can write here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyhyLKR2bNA


now i always say to people that the common know game that is most similar to MH is diablo.
yeah there is a story... but that's not what anyone is here for.

we are here for the gameplay and the gear building
and that goes waaay beyond the credits screen

it can get fast, but is a lot more methodical and deliberate than it might look. but is never twitchy. stuff that need reactions don't come out of nonwhere and in the end positioning, memory and awareness is king.

now MH have 14 weapons that are all VERY different from each other, i will say that playing with a different weapon can be a bigger difference than changing classes in a mmo. and because of that, there is always something to do. because good luck mastering all the weapons. that's why there is people with tens of thousands of hours in mh games that have been playing it since monster hunter 1.

the grind in monster hunter however is weeeeird, first the game _is_ the grind. but that's okay because the gameplay is fun and you always facing bosses, and you usually building the exact thing you want things out of materials not expecting that 1 random drop gear with all right stats.

however rare materials are a thing. those can have a drop of 10~20% if you do everything right to farm them. however latter in the game you have ways to use tokens for older rare items

the real grind however is decorations, decorations are stuff you slot in your armor for having exactly what you want on it, those drops are 100% random. you gonna be showered with those, but you will never get the exactly one you want. however decorations are optional, because you have access to everything in game thru craftable armor.

i personally find that mishmashing the stuff you have at hand for the best possible build you can do, to be a lot of fun, your milleage may vary tough

but for those's nothing wasted 100% meta as seen on youtube whatever builds that people think is the ultimate objective of the game... yeah those will require grind.