Curious if anyone has played through and if it’s worth the price tag
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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.