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So this is a thing, a kinda neat thing. Yeah. Dat Insect Glaive.

And lances, lances everywhere.

Any of you guys also playing this one? Me and my brothers have been happily hunting through it in the last couple of weeks.

Oh God it just doesn't end... I have other things I need to get done...

So far it's pretty great. The new weapons are a welcoming thing. Game does some hand-holding but who cares, I am not the type of elitist MH pricks who don't accept anything that isn't at their skill or beyond and kick out newbs with stale "git gud" meme talk. This game is an improvement in terms of finding people to hunt with, which was tiresome in the early ones due to most people ragequitting or at times faulty online multiplayer.

The basic game setup (the loop and the action play) are all still good but honestly I do wish they'd change it up a bit (not that they ever will as the present formula sells like crazy out east). The vertical movement thing in this one is fair enough but it's not as ambitious as the underwater stuff from the last set. There are also very few new monsters; it's a massive recycling of all the old content (and that's not that is a completely bad thing, but it still shows they are not pushing forwards). The engine is the same with minor improvements with movement. I guess a new engine would need a new platform to go with so maybe look for 5 for that...

... but even so, this is 90% the same game as before and I prefer series to innovate more than that. It has massive amounts of content but it feels like a giant expansion rather than a new entry in the series- we're at risk of going Madden/CoD here. I definitely agree it should be more accessible; the elitist attitude of making the game deliberately obscure to weed out the wrong types is madness.

As for multiplayer- they removed the absurd 100 player search pool bit, which definitely helps, but it's still a very inefficient system, forcing people into tiny 4 man lobbies and making you search those lobbies in the hope that a. they are doing the type of quest the lobby actually says it is doing and b. they haven't already started by the time you get there (and that's before we get into whether the group is any good or not- that's a universal issue but aggravated badly here by other time wastes). The whole system ends up with hundreds of people wanting to do the same thing but unable to find each other. They need something more like an MMO group finder- I want THIS quest done, group me with three others automatically. And take away the darn system where you have to host an urgent quest to advance with it- that leads to massive time wasting. If you complete the quest, it shouldn't matter who hosted it. It's not only repetitive, it's also not easy to find groups that will stick around for multiple plays.

(Those four man lobbies also show how they are stuck using the old engine- those were meant to hold much larger numbers of people- about 12- that could run multiple quests at once, acting much more like a lobby. But for the Western release of MH3 they cut the lobby size to 4 so it could handle voice chat- and now it is still at 4 because they just haven't changed the underlying system since. That's why the quest board has multiple slots for different people doing different quests- that's almost totally useless now as 95% of the time all four will do the same, but originally there might have been multiple groups at once)

And despite what I read, there is still a LOT of wasted non-fun time for the first hour or two of play. This game does ONE thing very well- fighting giant monsters. That's all it should ever do and it should be immediate and constant, not something that only gets going a few hours in. It's nice that they started with an action scene this time (though I reckon it would confuse new players) but they needed to stick with that vibe. Gather quests are crap. Small monster quests are crap. Their attempt at story is hilariously bad. It should be big monsters from step one and never stop- they could do with making tutorial monster types that will help new players learn how it all works.

It's also time they dumped the segregated mission areas in favour of a seamless one. I actually got tossed off of riding a monster yesterday because it took me past the area boundary trying to shake me off- what a cheat!

Nonetheless, the basic gameplay is still compelling enough that I'll shotgunlance it through to some vague type of ending point, I guess... I'll see what this Sergios thing is like.

Capcom loves to fine tweak their series before going to major revamps, my expectations with MH4 in the improvement department were tame. 3DS multiplayer is a huge selling point, if anything it makes feel the previous installment bare bones.

Next time, just add a massive pool of new monsters Capcom.

DLC so far has been pretty neat.