Tildes Gaming Club, February 2024: Legacy

As I've gotten myself moved and the early parts of the new business going I've gone back to Monster Hunter, because its structure is very amenable to "ah shit I've only got about 30 minutes here". You can still make good progress in that time, and it's very easy to just drop it and come back later. Quests can't ever be more than 50 minutes most of the time, and I've played for so long that I can say with confidence most of even the hardest things won't take me more than 20-30. I can sit down with limited time and know just about every time it's going to be enjoyable. MH began in 2004 and has been continuously iterated upon since then. The teams of people making it enjoy what seems like a really awesome setup - a "main" game gets developed, where new concepts are first attempted, and then a followup game will come along that iterates on what the main game did. What works especially well carries over past those two games.

Originally I was playing Rise again, but decided to go back to World since that's what tons of other folks are doing, and good lord I had forgotten what a beautiful, and beautifully put together, game that is. It doesn't really try to do anything deep with its characters and story, but its audio-visual presentation and intricate gameplay systems set it apart in my opinion. In the way a band develops its sound and then pushes it to new places, MH developed its setup and then pushed that into whatever directions seemed interesting. World was a deliberate attempt at making the nicest looking, smoothest playing version up to that point, and it makes a huge difference when you can compare directly with what came after. I like Rise, a lot, but World is just on a whole other level with its graphical presentation and level design, gameplay differences aside. I just don't know of a lot with levels as lush and detailed as these, that put so much emphasis on delivering an illusion of being an active ecosystem.

My character is built toward how i like to play. I am a dumb barbarian - I like to run in and beat the shit out of stuff and not think too much about it. If an element is helpful, slap an element jewel in the weapon, done. I've played these games long enough that I no longer enjoy putting together armor loadouts for every situation - I have much more fun attempting to thread the needle of creating a "one size fits all" build, and change weapon/tactics to adjust to new stuff. I main Sword and Shield, but switch to longsword when I want reach, and dual blades when I'm especially confident. World made a specific change to Sword and Shield I just cannot get over - the side-swipe/step-slash. During your combo, pretty much regardless of the move you're doing, if you push the stick in another direction and hit the attack button, your character will turn to face and slash forward, enabling an infinite combo if you time it right. Nearly every move can combo into and out of this. I basically built the whole character around stunning the monsters so that I could just keep doing this because it's so satisfying, like getting shit right in a fighting game but for as long as you can maintain it.

As you go through, the game just keeps opening up. Because of the game's history and good management, you are experiencing systems that were carefully honed across multiple games. You won't come across much jank, like skills that don't do what they say they do, stats that don't calculate right, etc etc. You can trust what you see and rely on things to be consistent. What you'll typically encounter is a set of mechanics that get introduced, you're turned loose with that, and as you accomplish things your options begin to expand. In the beginning (called Low Rank), you can rely mostly on "big number good", and just focus on getting to grips with how the weapons work. Armor skills exist, but nothing at this point is going to be so difficult as to necessitate building a loadout around much of anything. As you clear the content, you unlock High Rank, where you are put up against more powerful versions of everything you've thus far seen, plus new, scarier monsters. High Rank has you focusing more on armor skills, because now the monsters are difficult enough that those skills can radically change how long things take. Finally, at Master Rank, you again are reintroduced to all the monsters you've thus far seen, enhanced with new behaviors and moves, and a final set of new monsters is revealed to you. At that point, it's really important to carefully put your build together, because a bad setup can mean excessively long hunting time or just having to deal with overwhelming damage. Basically, the game eases you in very, very gradually, and then provides a complete experience of ramping up as far as you could go.

I will always play these games. MH is one of those special kinds of projects where folks have kept it up for a very long time, and so it's difficult to directly copy what it's doing. You can make a similar game, for sure, but a new developer has to do everything from scratch. The people making MH don't have to do that - they have their whole development history to look back on, use what already works, and elaborate where they want. By the time a competitor gets up to snuff, MH has broken new ground and integrated the lessons of it into the basic setup. It's very difficult to recreate something that exists as a result of a long, complex history and I don't think anyone has yet to do that with respect to MH. Competitor series like God Eater, or newer attempts like Dauntless and Wild Hearts, can't actually compete because a lot of what makes MH good is just plain hard work. Clever systems can produce cool stuff but it's gonna be tough to come out the gate with something that competes against 20 years of feedback. And again, because the teams making MH are as creative as ever, by the time someone does pull that off, MH is past it.

I'm really excited for Wilds, because all along the way it's felt like there's a specific idea of what they want MH to be, that just hasn't yet been possible. A certain scale and level of detail seem to always have been goals, but reaching them has been gradual and piecemeal. It's only been with World and Rise that we got maps that didn't have loading zones, and MH has experimented with vertical movement going back to Tri. There's clearly a desire to have this big space where you can go anywhere and use what's around to help hunt down the monster, and I hope with Wilds they push the scale way out past anything they've done before. A multi-biome, open map done by these teams is guaranteed to be a beautiful thing.

Anyway, that's what I'm up to. I've stopped following a lot of what happens in gaming in favor of diving deep on the stuff that lasts. There are a few groups out there doing just ridiculously good work, who are reaping big rewards and using those rewards to do it that much better, again. The "true" top of the class, I suppose might be a way of saying it - games that meet with continuous, big success because they're made well, as opposed to "successfully suckered some gambling addicts" and such. The "best" is happening all around us just like the worst, it's just that you have to decide what "best" means for yourself before you can find it. To me, the best of what capital g Gaming has to offer is stuff like MH - big, intricate things continuously growing and changing, delivering an ever-more-complex experience each time a new one happens, getting ever closer to the self-imposed ideal.