With the steam sales, Monster Hunter World was available at a really good price, and thought I'd get it. Unfortunately, I realized how much of the game was just standing out to me in a negative way, and I just stopped at about the hour mark and got a refund.
First, there was no way to invert the mouse Y axis during the tutorial. There was no combat or anything, just running away with the WASD keys, so that was fine, but I can't believe the options menu was not available till I arrived on the island. That wasn't a good start.
Next, movement. Maybe I'm being overly harsh here, but the feet of my character was slipping all over the ground when walking. What the hell. This is a modern video game, surely foot locking is not a difficult thing to do? I'm extremely sensitive to this as I've been working on crowd systems in houdini, and slipping feet simply takes away a massive part of the realism. With a 3rd person perspective where my character is right up against the lower third of the screen, I thought this was rather offputting, and also pretty interesting as I've watched gameplay demos before buying it, and I did not feel any issue then. To be fair, I did not notice it much during the first portion of the game that was set in a forest. It was when I hit the city that it was bloody apparent and took a lot of the immersiveness out.
Next, there was a part during the tutorial where my NPC companion and I were hunted and surrounded by massive lizards at least 3 times my body weight. This was the part of the game where the tutorial teaches you how to hide from them. But here's the thing. We're two people, with no weapons, surrounded by a dozen lizards. Keyword here: SURROUNDED.
My companion shouts out at me to run towards a big bush, and to hold down spacebar to be quiet and hide.
I ran the wrong way and....
Nothing happened. Bloody lizards appeared to be out there to soak in the sunshine.
NPC continued to get me to move over to them, and the lizards did not seem to hear anything. Ok, so maybe they're er... deaf?
But then I ran over to the bush, THROUGH A DOZEN LIZARDS, and there was zero reaction. Next, I then crouched down in a bush that will never, ever be able to hide two fully grown humans, and the bloody lizards seemed to go: "Oh noes, where have the humans gone? We can't see them. Let's go home now."
Jarring. Just jarring. This totally broke my immersion of the game. Giant lizards hunting us, stopped doing so just so we can hide in a bush?! No sense of smell? Terrible eyesight? Hard of hearing? That's BS. A better way could have been designed to teach us this mechanic, perhaps running from bush to bush and hiding to avoid roving lizards. Sigh. Sorry, this part really stuck out to me, and that was barely a few minutes into the tutorial.
What pushed me over was when I started on the weapons tutorials. There are a massive amount of playstyles in MHW, from aerial weapons to bow weapons, swords and shields to transforming weapons. But the four-five I tried just felt meh. Some of the weapons actually felt too heavy, too impactful for what they were. Shocking. Also, the controls were probably optimized for console - blocking with my shield was an odd button on my mouse, mouse 4. Remapping it messed up some camera controls, and I just gave up and ran with the defaults as I wasn't in the mood to go through the menu system, something I found really unintuitive.
It was about then I said I'm done with this and got a refund. It's a pity I got affected by these things that most people probably don't care about. The models and environment look amazing, and the attention to detail on the characters is just fantastic.
I'm really curious about the lore too, are the cats slaves? Why are they helping humans? Like, I only saw one cat in the "council" meeting. The human:cat ratio seemed really uneven. Ah... well I'm not gonna go down that road. Next game, I hope I won't be that picky. Ha!
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