If you’re not desperate to play co-op with a specific group of people, then the answer is almost always “no, wait for discount”. In this case, the answer is “no, wait for discount and performance patches and the inevitable expansion”. I didn’t pick up World until last year, and it was cheaper, better optimized, and had twice as much content as launch day. Still plenty of people to play with, too. Fans of the series aren’t going to migrate anywhere else for at least another five years.
I talked my friends into playing it with World, and then found out you can't play normal co-op in the story missions, which you have to do to actually unlock 90% of the game. They expect you to play through a lengthy campaign before you can consistently play with each other. Saying "Okay, you have a 15 hour homework assignment before we can actually play together, and we'll never have the new game experience with each other" is not acceptable.
If you join your friends into a 'link party' in Wilds you can join each other's story quests without issues. The story in Wilds is really short anyway and then you're off to hunt and just do whatever. The main issue is if you're in an open-ended party session you're stuck on the current map, no switching to other maps. Essentially every map now works like the Guiding lands from World.
For whatever reason, painfully few games know how to do co-op right. I played remnant 2 with a buddy last year, and it was perfect. Duplicate loot so both of us got every drop. Fully shared campaign progression from start to finish. Easy drop in and drop out. The game has issues but we’re happily overlooked them because the co-op was done right.
Why do so many devs struggle with this shit? We have a sizable list of games that we considered playing only to skip them entirely when we found out that they had wonky co-op. It’s honestly a dealbreaker for me.
Worlds is an egregious one, for sure. You can’t pull in a new player for co-op. Either you join up with preexisting players or fans of the franchise because the onboarding is horrendous.
I talked my friends into playing it with World, and then found out you can't play normal co-op in the story missions
This is not the case because the other week my buddy helped carry me through the first Zorah Magdaros mission. I would have been very lost on that mountain and very salty had he not been there.
It's been a few years since I had played it, but this is the problem in more detail:
Any mission that has a cutscene- so most or all story missions- cannot be joined unless the host and joining players have all seen any cutscenes. Every person has to see the cutscene at the beginning of the hunt, so all new players have to load the hunt, find the monster, watch the cutscene after you found it, then all but one leaves their hunt and joins him. So you presumably launched an SOS flare for your friend after any cutscenes, or on your second attempt after watching them, and your friend had already played the mission, so he had already seen it. If you had both been new, you would have both had to play the mission alone until after any cutscenes, then one would invite the other. I had thought that the joiners would additionally not get credit for completion, but it seems like that's not true, but it's still a lot of additional friction with no real justification.
It's pretty much the same in Wilds. Once you're done walking to your objective and watching your cutscenes, the battle will start and that will create a mission that is joinable by other people. So if everybody is playing the story at the same time, 3 people will have to skip out of their mission and then join the fourth.
Monster Hunter World also wasn't nearly the unoptimized mess that Wilds is. It had its share of performance issues on launch, but not quite like this and it didn't seem be to nearly as widespread.
World was unoptimized, but that was mostly fixable coding issues that they eventually accomplished.
Wilds has 2 DRMs operating at once, one of which is Capcom's own personal one which is incredibly bad, an in-house engine that is made for single-player linear levels trying to run an open world game, and multiple "special graphics " settings built into it making it a game of trial and error to figure out which one is destroying your system.
They screwed themselves hard on trying to fix it, and even that "million players on launch" metric is already fucked by how many were forced to refund due to it being unplayable.
The story is annoying and constant but you can skip the cutscenes without any real loss, especially as Low Rank is now fully tutorial mode only with it being faceroll so you are just dragging it out longer by watching the stupid cutscenes.
But the game is so poorly optimized that you have a low chance of being able to actually play it without constant and major issues. Not even a "upgrade your PC" problem but top to bottom of the line hardware just doesn't work because of a shit ton of bad choices in the code.
So no, its absolutely not worth it right now. Its pretty great if you can actually play it, but that's a huge if at the moment. Give it until Summer and check back in, imo.
I haven't played, but this thread from c/gaming has some complaints that may or may not be relevant to you. I've also heard it's not well-optimized, but I don't know how bad an optimization job we're talking about, exactly.
No, get Rise + Sunbreak. Runs great without requiring a NASA supercomputer and co-op fixed the story related breaks that World had. It goes on sale for super cheap. (I got both for $10 total recently). Plus, it's just really darn good. I've already got 100 hours in and plenty to do still.
Wilds is baby's first Monster Hunter with all the modern walking cutscenes and challenge surgically removed all for an absurd price.
You don't get to call anything baby's first monster hunter if you're advocating rise, or world.
Play the real monster hunter games if you want to talk shit, not "free environmental damage, free get out of jail moves, monsters helping you kill eachother, unlimited items" bullshit. Rise is better at being a spiderman game than it is at being monster hunter. The new games stripped the soul of monster hunter from the gameplay, and made the hunter basically dante doing animal abuse instead of someone actually using timing and strategy to fight a monster that is overwhelmingly stronger and faster than them.
You'll just have to come up with a term to describe how much easier Wilds is than Rise and World then. There's no doubt the legacy games are in a league their own, but Wilds is another step past the previous games in difficulty reduction.
Wait a few years for them to sort their shit out and pick up Monster Hunter Worlds in the meantime. That's what I'm doing and I've been having a blast.
bro its cracked, literally get the DODI or Fitgirl version instead of dropped your hard earned money on a 2025 game that looks like a 2015 game but demands 2025 specs to run
If you like fighting boss type monsters and don't mind having to go through the cutscenes for the story then I think it is worthwhile.
I think Monster Hunter is just a fun game, the story really takes away from the game and honestly has since World but once you are through the story it no longer matters so I just kind of slog through it.
I play these to kill big boss monsters and because it is satisfying to play different weapons well, but if you can't get over some faggotry in the story and with NPCs then I wouldn't suggest it.
unplayable performance issues. if you have something along the lines of a 4070 and a beefy cpu you might be able to hit 60 on medium 1080p - otherwise it's impossible. i'm running on a 2070 that ran CP2077 on medium fine and an i7-12700kf, and it can't do more than 40fps on absolute-lowest 360p (with AI upscaling to 1080p), which in reality feels more like 25 fps while looking like a half-forgotten dream of a late ps2 game. i am honestly flabbergasted how they sold as much on PC as they did, given that a lot of Steam users are still on old 10xx GPUs or budget stuff like 3060s and i know for a fact they can't run it above 40.
you can consider me a monster hunter fan - i took up my Rise Sunbreak playthrough as a result of Wilds launching - and even i had to refund rather than sit through that.
Personally would have waited until at least the expansion is out, but my best friend was desperate to play it at launch and since we wanted to play together, I kinda had to.
Gameplay wise it's pretty much the same as World, with a few new features. And I have noticed the monsters all die a lot faster and the fights seem way easier (although I've only just unlocked High Rank, so maybe both of this will change).
Instead of separating the camp and the world into missions, it's designed like an open world, kinda like the Guiding Lands in World were.
The story isn't anything special, but neither were those of World and Rise. And it's at the same time super woke and weirdly politically incorrect.
Your Hunter's Guild from the west found this little jeet boy on a research expedition in some eastern lands and now you want to help him find his way back home, while at the same time learning more about the lands and the local fauna. From there you basically help the various tribes of brown people with their problems (and essentially save them from annihilation), 'cuz despite living in monster infested hellholes, they don't know what weapons are. I actually laughed out loud, when the NPC's expressed confusion upon seeing my weapons, because I could have understood them maybe not knowing what a bowgun is, but i use Dual Blades, which are nothing more than oversized knives.
Wilds has the worst multiplayer in franchise history. Is the game good, yes. Is any monster Hunter worth the initial price? No, not unless you are a pre world's fan of the series like I am and need to get your hunt on.
Apparently it's yet another half-finished "we'll-fix-it-with-the-updates" modern release. At least the art style seems to have improved a bit from World.
If you’re not desperate to play co-op with a specific group of people, then the answer is almost always “no, wait for discount”. In this case, the answer is “no, wait for discount and performance patches and the inevitable expansion”. I didn’t pick up World until last year, and it was cheaper, better optimized, and had twice as much content as launch day. Still plenty of people to play with, too. Fans of the series aren’t going to migrate anywhere else for at least another five years.
Have they made co-op not retarded?
I talked my friends into playing it with World, and then found out you can't play normal co-op in the story missions, which you have to do to actually unlock 90% of the game. They expect you to play through a lengthy campaign before you can consistently play with each other. Saying "Okay, you have a 15 hour homework assignment before we can actually play together, and we'll never have the new game experience with each other" is not acceptable.
If you join your friends into a 'link party' in Wilds you can join each other's story quests without issues. The story in Wilds is really short anyway and then you're off to hunt and just do whatever. The main issue is if you're in an open-ended party session you're stuck on the current map, no switching to other maps. Essentially every map now works like the Guiding lands from World.
For whatever reason, painfully few games know how to do co-op right. I played remnant 2 with a buddy last year, and it was perfect. Duplicate loot so both of us got every drop. Fully shared campaign progression from start to finish. Easy drop in and drop out. The game has issues but we’re happily overlooked them because the co-op was done right.
Why do so many devs struggle with this shit? We have a sizable list of games that we considered playing only to skip them entirely when we found out that they had wonky co-op. It’s honestly a dealbreaker for me.
Worlds is an egregious one, for sure. You can’t pull in a new player for co-op. Either you join up with preexisting players or fans of the franchise because the onboarding is horrendous.
This is not the case because the other week my buddy helped carry me through the first Zorah Magdaros mission. I would have been very lost on that mountain and very salty had he not been there.
It's been a few years since I had played it, but this is the problem in more detail:
Any mission that has a cutscene- so most or all story missions- cannot be joined unless the host and joining players have all seen any cutscenes. Every person has to see the cutscene at the beginning of the hunt, so all new players have to load the hunt, find the monster, watch the cutscene after you found it, then all but one leaves their hunt and joins him. So you presumably launched an SOS flare for your friend after any cutscenes, or on your second attempt after watching them, and your friend had already played the mission, so he had already seen it. If you had both been new, you would have both had to play the mission alone until after any cutscenes, then one would invite the other. I had thought that the joiners would additionally not get credit for completion, but it seems like that's not true, but it's still a lot of additional friction with no real justification.
It's pretty much the same in Wilds. Once you're done walking to your objective and watching your cutscenes, the battle will start and that will create a mission that is joinable by other people. So if everybody is playing the story at the same time, 3 people will have to skip out of their mission and then join the fourth.
Ah, he was further ahead so that might be what was going on.
Monster Hunter World also wasn't nearly the unoptimized mess that Wilds is. It had its share of performance issues on launch, but not quite like this and it didn't seem be to nearly as widespread.
World was unoptimized, but that was mostly fixable coding issues that they eventually accomplished.
Wilds has 2 DRMs operating at once, one of which is Capcom's own personal one which is incredibly bad, an in-house engine that is made for single-player linear levels trying to run an open world game, and multiple "special graphics " settings built into it making it a game of trial and error to figure out which one is destroying your system.
They screwed themselves hard on trying to fix it, and even that "million players on launch" metric is already fucked by how many were forced to refund due to it being unplayable.
I miss the MT Framework engine. That one managed to create so many great games.
Its woke https://communities.win/c/Gaming/p/19AdprE23q/monster-hunter-wilds-story-is-on/c
Also you shouldn't be buying anything Capcom, they are one of the most woke companies out there
[Checks current price] For $70?
No. Hell no. Maybe when it hits $5.
The story is annoying and constant but you can skip the cutscenes without any real loss, especially as Low Rank is now fully tutorial mode only with it being faceroll so you are just dragging it out longer by watching the stupid cutscenes.
But the game is so poorly optimized that you have a low chance of being able to actually play it without constant and major issues. Not even a "upgrade your PC" problem but top to bottom of the line hardware just doesn't work because of a shit ton of bad choices in the code.
So no, its absolutely not worth it right now. Its pretty great if you can actually play it, but that's a huge if at the moment. Give it until Summer and check back in, imo.
I haven't played, but this thread from c/gaming has some complaints that may or may not be relevant to you. I've also heard it's not well-optimized, but I don't know how bad an optimization job we're talking about, exactly.
It has terrible PC performance issues.
No, get Rise + Sunbreak. Runs great without requiring a NASA supercomputer and co-op fixed the story related breaks that World had. It goes on sale for super cheap. (I got both for $10 total recently). Plus, it's just really darn good. I've already got 100 hours in and plenty to do still.
Wilds is baby's first Monster Hunter with all the modern walking cutscenes and challenge surgically removed all for an absurd price.
You don't get to call anything baby's first monster hunter if you're advocating rise, or world.
Play the real monster hunter games if you want to talk shit, not "free environmental damage, free get out of jail moves, monsters helping you kill eachother, unlimited items" bullshit. Rise is better at being a spiderman game than it is at being monster hunter. The new games stripped the soul of monster hunter from the gameplay, and made the hunter basically dante doing animal abuse instead of someone actually using timing and strategy to fight a monster that is overwhelmingly stronger and faster than them.
You'll just have to come up with a term to describe how much easier Wilds is than Rise and World then. There's no doubt the legacy games are in a league their own, but Wilds is another step past the previous games in difficulty reduction.
I managed to snag it on a CD key site for like 20$ cheaper. But my advice is: unless you are really desperate, wait.
Currently the game is insanely unoptimzed, skills are bugged to hell and back, there's practically no build diversity.
On launch? I doubt it.
Wait a few years for them to sort their shit out and pick up Monster Hunter Worlds in the meantime. That's what I'm doing and I've been having a blast.
bro its cracked, literally get the DODI or Fitgirl version instead of dropped your hard earned money on a 2025 game that looks like a 2015 game but demands 2025 specs to run
If you like fighting boss type monsters and don't mind having to go through the cutscenes for the story then I think it is worthwhile.
I think Monster Hunter is just a fun game, the story really takes away from the game and honestly has since World but once you are through the story it no longer matters so I just kind of slog through it.
I play these to kill big boss monsters and because it is satisfying to play different weapons well, but if you can't get over some faggotry in the story and with NPCs then I wouldn't suggest it.
unplayable performance issues. if you have something along the lines of a 4070 and a beefy cpu you might be able to hit 60 on medium 1080p - otherwise it's impossible. i'm running on a 2070 that ran CP2077 on medium fine and an i7-12700kf, and it can't do more than 40fps on absolute-lowest 360p (with AI upscaling to 1080p), which in reality feels more like 25 fps while looking like a half-forgotten dream of a late ps2 game. i am honestly flabbergasted how they sold as much on PC as they did, given that a lot of Steam users are still on old 10xx GPUs or budget stuff like 3060s and i know for a fact they can't run it above 40.
you can consider me a monster hunter fan - i took up my Rise Sunbreak playthrough as a result of Wilds launching - and even i had to refund rather than sit through that.
Personally would have waited until at least the expansion is out, but my best friend was desperate to play it at launch and since we wanted to play together, I kinda had to.
Gameplay wise it's pretty much the same as World, with a few new features. And I have noticed the monsters all die a lot faster and the fights seem way easier (although I've only just unlocked High Rank, so maybe both of this will change).
Instead of separating the camp and the world into missions, it's designed like an open world, kinda like the Guiding Lands in World were.
The story isn't anything special, but neither were those of World and Rise. And it's at the same time super woke and weirdly politically incorrect.
Your Hunter's Guild from the west found this little jeet boy on a research expedition in some eastern lands and now you want to help him find his way back home, while at the same time learning more about the lands and the local fauna. From there you basically help the various tribes of brown people with their problems (and essentially save them from annihilation), 'cuz despite living in monster infested hellholes, they don't know what weapons are. I actually laughed out loud, when the NPC's expressed confusion upon seeing my weapons, because I could have understood them maybe not knowing what a bowgun is, but i use Dual Blades, which are nothing more than oversized knives.
Wilds has the worst multiplayer in franchise history. Is the game good, yes. Is any monster Hunter worth the initial price? No, not unless you are a pre world's fan of the series like I am and need to get your hunt on.
Apparently it's yet another half-finished "we'll-fix-it-with-the-updates" modern release. At least the art style seems to have improved a bit from World.