Where the true journey begins.

Xeno’Jiva is down, which effectively marks the transition from story game (and High Rank) to end game.  From the start until this point, there was mostly linear progress.  I am now in the horizontal progress phase.  What I mean by that is that I never felt the need to hunt a specific monster for a rare drop.  I just kept plugging away at the Assigned (story) quests until I got here.  It’s provided me with a rank 5 (of 8) weapon, which has been quite enough for most cases.  I’ve also acquired a fair chunk of armor upgrade, making earlier battles a lot easier.

What’s next is the question.

Breadth & Depth

In terms of weapons, I need to fan out with a few more Charge Blades that address specific monster weaknesses.  The one I have now is focused on Blast damage (build up for an explosion), but it would be extremely practical for a set of water/fire/ice/dragon weapons to dramatically speed up specialized farming.

Some high level theories on damage.  Some weapons provide innate elemental damage.  That listed damage coverts ~10% per attack (depending on weapon speed).  So if a weapon lists something like 500 normal, 250 elemental, then on a monster weak to that element, you will be doing 50% more damage per attack.  In practice most weapons have a 25% bonus through elemental damage.  This can be further boosted through weapon enchantments (gems) up to their cap.  That cap depends on the base damage… more complicated than need be so here’s a link to explain it.

This is all discounting the fact that some weapons are just plain better on some enemies than others.  The Charge Blade (Hammer and Greatsword are similar) are skill-based weapons that require very good positioning.  Something like Dual Blade or Sword and Shield can be much more mobile.  Some enemies spend way too long in the air, or have some seriously deadly AE attacks, making ranged weapons a better alternative.

A Good Defense

At the base, everyone needs armor.  It has a linear relationship to the amount of damage you take.  High rank gear makes a tremendous different when it comes to a generic armor set.

Yet similar to weapons, armors have elemental resistances.  Something like Teostra who is pure fire, would be best served by fire resistance.  It’s entirely possible to find a piece of gear with amazing armor stat but resistances that make you into a wet tissue.  Fighting Kirin without Lightning resistance is key to a bad time.

I will say that elemental resistances are the safety net of battles.  If you are significantly overpowering your target, then it doesn’t matter that much.  If something like Teostra is taking half your life with a single swing… then get some fire resistance and see a world of difference.

Putting it into Practice

Bazelgeuse.  I need his horns.  I wasn’t too flustered with him in the past as a dual blade user – easy to get in and out.  Charge Blade is more of a challenge since you can get move locked and then he decides to blow up everything around him.

This particular mission decided to have Deviljo show up.  For those unawares, he randomly spawns in HR zones and is top of the food chain.  He will attack anything, and doesn’t give up chase.  I didn’t realize he was in this zone until he roared (stunned me), which gave Bazel ample time to finish his dive bomb and wipe me out.

He is massive.  He’s even deadlier when he has a monster in his jaws.

My second death was also due to that bugger shoulder checking me into the wall, then body slamming Bazel on my body.  Ok, enough.  I knew I had Bazel on the ropes, he took a nap and I put a barrel bomb to get things going again.  Deviljo was far away, so I figure to finish it off with a mount.

Sure enough, as I’m in the middle of the final swing of the mount attack, Deviljo shows up.  Maybe I lucked out, maybe it’s the code, but he didn’t attack me while mounted.  He did however attack me when I dismounted and couldn’t move.  3rd faint and will need to give it another shot.

So now the journey begins to round out the gear set.  Less large jumps in power and more about targeting specific builds for specific monsters.  Make a goal and work back from there.  Fun times.

Einstein was right.

There’s an interesting argument to be had around the duration of an activity in relation to another.  The old “holding a burning pot vs a loved one” argument. Mega Man’s 25 screens/level format feels just the right length of engagement, while the time spent travelling between one location and another in Pillars of Eternity can feel like years.  Clearly, it’s based on subjective pleasure of an activity.  More than that, it often relates to player engagement.

Menial tasks are not engaging.  Very few people find pleasure from the act of cleaning a garage, though the end result is certainly pleasant and cathartic.  Games that focus on the menial busywork lose my attention quickly.  I certainly don’t mind fiddling with details, but those details need purpose and impact.  Back to PoE2 for a second.  I’m still stuck in the first part of the game because travel takes so damn long and does nothing for the game.  I’ve never had a random event, a ship battle, and only seen 2 isles to explore – all without combat.  Why pad on 2-3 minutes of non-interactive and repetitive gameplay?  Spider-Man has a ton of travel, but the act of travelling is chocked full of random events and interactive gameplay.  You learn the ability to fast travel long before you’ve completed the checklist of random events.

The disengagement from WoW relates strongly to this as well.  World Quests are even more menial than in Legion.  Dungeons (non-M+) could have been mistaken for MoP dungeons in many cases.  The world and story items are excellent, but they lack replayability.  I truthfully miss Suramar’s evolving story, or the Withered dungeon, or the Mage Tower.

MH:W’s missions are generally time-based – 50 minutes a shot.  Sometimes less if you’re on an investigation.  50 minutes that cannot be paused I may add.  When you start off the game and learning the ropes, very few battles go over 20 minutes.  As you progress, the larger enemies start taking a lot longer.  Either due to them having larger HP pools, or due to the combat mechanics requiring more patience.

Example is a recent Lavasioth fight.  30 minutes to hunt, and I wanted to actually capture it for the collection.  Capturing and fighting all monsters in the Arena unlocks extra gear bits.  He’s a bit of a bugger as his armor gets more resistant over time, until he goes back in the magma.  He also has a tremendously powerful fireball attack, so positioning is key.  Throw in a roaming Rathalos and you have a potent mix for long fights.  I ended the fight with about 2 minutes to spare.  Dung pods would have helped with the Rathalos.  Making the fight go faster still requires a better weapon (such as water-based), and overall better skill with using the weapon.  Considering I’ve just completed Nergigante, I need a whole lot more drops to widen my weapon arsenal.

Still, if I were to randomly capture 5 minutes of that fight, it would likely include a whole pile of dodging, rolling, striking, healing, and getting thrown around.  It would be more hectic than practiced, that’s for sure.  But every piece of that would be engaging to me.  Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly menial tasks in MH:W- like killing 8 Girros or some such.  But they are so rare, that they feel like reprieve from the walking death machines on other quests.

MH:W doesn’t do bite-size gaming well, since you can’t really leave a quest mid-point without losing all the previous progress.  It doesn’t try to.  It does moment to moment gaming very well, so that you don’t see the time go by.  Better than a whole pile of other games I’ve played in recent years.  I often find myself losing track of time, thinking I’m a minute away from my goal.  Then the dreaded “one more turn” thought comes in, and there goes 15 more minutes.  That’s an oddly good feeling to have – wish it applied to more things in life.

He’s a zone unto himself.

MHW has 3 phases.  Low Rank (LR), High Rank (HR), and Tempered (T).  Each tends to focus on an Elder Dragon – some mean buggers.  Low Rank is all about Zora Magdaros.

That’s a walking mountain

The missions with Zora are not at all like other hunts.  They start off on his (it’s?) back where you need to destroy 3 cores that do fire damage.  You also have the option of fighting Nergigante – but that is seriously a bad idea.  While roaming on his back, you can mine a few ore spots, for much needed material to craft some decent gear. The next part varies but the repeatable version includes you shooting canons, a dragonator (a giant spike), and ballistae for about 10 minutes until he finally drops.  The only difficulty here is not dying to the magmacore fire attacks.

If you luck out, you can do this quest 2 more times after the first, and that should give you at least 1 HR piece of Zora armor.  Which is a significant boost.

From here you reach the first major interlude.  The goal of which is to enter HR areas and find some Rathian clues.  Just regular exploring will work, but you’ll need to spend a lot of time doing it.  You can boost this by completing some rank 6 quests.  I’m at this spot now.

If I recall, the game then takes a more open approach following this step.  You’ll get a bunch of optional quests, but the main one will be about finding the 3 elder dragons, killing Nergigante (super death mode), killing the 3 elders, then finally Xeno’jiva.  From that point forward you’ll have access to Tempered monsters.

On paper, I’m about 75% of the way there since I have 7 monster kill quests to go.  In reality… not so much since I’ll need to improve my gear to take on those 7 monsters.

Guard Point

My previous playthrough was focused on Dual Blades.  It was extremely visceral and had little to do with thinking.  Sure, there was a skill ceiling higher than just mashing buttons – but mashing buttons was so fulfilling!  That generated a lot of hard walls to climb.  Anjanath, Pink Rathian, Nergigante… those buggers were death incarnate.  I had to really learn the game mechanics to get past them – in particular monster weaknesses, attack patterns, and the i-frame dodge.  That last one is extremely useful for Nergigante’s attacks that can/will 1-shot you.  If your weapon is sheathed, and you dodge, you’ll actually throw yourself to the ground and be immune to damage for about a second.  Given you need to sheath, it’s not something you can quickly react to.

The Charge Blade has that dodge as well as a thing called Guard Point.  I’m pretty sure the Sword & Shield have this too.  The thing here is that you have 3 particular movements that present your shield in front of you, and if the monster hits that shield they take damage and you take none.  It took a while for me to learn the timing of this, and Diablos is the best one to try this with first.

When I figured out how to properly use Guard Point, my gameplay changed.  I tend to be somewhat conservative, looking for an opening, and then striking.  Effective use of Guard Points means I can go all out, and counter 90% of physical attacks.  And with a boosted shield, I can do even more damage, countered with an immediate SAED.

It took a while to figure out the timing, but wow, does it ever make combat more engaging.

Games are a series of meaningful choices.  Meaningful.

Snakes and Ladders, Candyland, games of that type have no choices.  It’s entirely random.  Something like Yahtzee has choices based on statistical chance, so the odds certainly favor someone strong in math than just a random roll.  The rolls in one turn have minimal impact on the next turn, just the overall score.  Compare that to say, Risk, where early decisions (and random luck) will impact nearly every other turn that follows.  The complete other side of that is Chess or Go, with no randomness with players who understand the mechanics.

Then we look at replay value, which is often predicated on the number of choices present.  7th Continent is a really good example of a game with a solid set of meaningful choices, but a limited supply.  Once you know that A does B – every time – then you can choose to pick or skip A.  The choice is effectively removed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about meaningful choices lately.  MMOs seem to be going more towards the removal of choice, and focus on randomness.  Single player games are all about choices.  Spider-Man, God of War, Horizon, Zelda… all games where the player is in control of their choices, and there’s a clear line between their actions and the consequences.  In the GoW Valkyrie fights, I never once felt cheated by some random event.  They were extremely hard, and each death was painful, but they were all based on clear choices I made.

Running through MHW anew really brings that point home.  I can remember the large scale items of the game, the systems, the layouts of the maps, the types of enemies, and their general habits.  I know that if I need Ancient Bones… well, I’m only going to find them in one place.  Same with Mosswine.  But the specifics, I don’t remember that part.  For example, I know there’s a campsite in the northern Wastes if you drop down a small cubby hole.  I have no idea what materials are required to actually unlock access to it.  I know that Barroth has a tough armor to crack, but there was a way to get around that without Mind’s Eye that eludes me.

It’s a bit like having a lot of puzzle pieces and the picture on the box is fuzzy.  Knowing something but not quite remembering what it is.  It’s both frustrating since you feel like you should know, and fulfilling when you do get it and get a really solid ahhhhhhh.

Long story short, MHW is more fun now since the frustrations of obtuse mechanics isn’t there anymore.  I can focus on executing my strategy, and then the moment to moment events.  Like having to collect 20 mushrooms and ending up killing a Great Jagras and Pukei-Pukei in the same run.  That just doesn’t seem to get old.  Next up is my previous nemesis, Anjanath.  The fire breathing T-Rex.

I have an aversion to repeating tutorials.  Many of them are built for people who have never picked up a controller before.  While I’m sure those people exist, I am not one of them.  Monster Hunter World however, the “newbie” tutorial lasts about 1 minute and it involves moving up two walls and jumping off a dragon’s head.  There are worse things in life.

The tutorials past that point are almost as obtuse as the game itself.  I still recall my first 10 hours on PS4, still not understanding the basics of just food – let alone elemental effects.  There are even embedded videos to show you how to properly use one of the 14 weapons but not a single one does justice.

I have experience with Dual Blades (by far the most offensively mobile), the Switch Axe (easy controls, decent damage), and the Charge Blade (technical, with highest damage potential).  And that’s with hours and hours of practice.  I decided to give the Charge Blade a go as primary in this run, and woo-boy, do I have rust.

Here’s one of the better tutorials for that weapon.  It’s 18 minutes.

Rust is polite.  The first few fights are simple.  Some generic lizards (Jagras), their ugly uncle (Great Jagras), and then the Kula-Ya-Ku (a slow witted bird).  If you can aim, you can take these buggers out.  And that’s my issue with the Charge Blade – aiming.

MH:W has a dance to battles, a rhythm.  You press buttons in a specific sequence, and depending on the state of animation, you press other buttons.  Charge Blade is really strong on that latter item.  I have a shield charge attack that starts with holding a button… press it too long and it deflates.  Charging my shield requires me actively cancelling another attack.  Charging my sword is the same.  If I time it all perfect, then I get the shield charged, more phials, and can launch ultron mode (super amped elemental discharge – or SAED).  That attack can take out 25% of an enemy’s HP.  And if I time it right, I can get 2 of them off during a single enemy stun.

So the potential is there.  I just need some practice to get back into the groove.   Well that’s a bit of a lie, I was never excellent at the Charge Blade.  Dual Blades were my life source, and I took down every possible enemy with that thing.  The true test for any weapon is Nergigante.  Kill him, and you know how to use a weapon.  I did, but never in a single try.  Always room to improve.

So starts my MH:W journey on PC.  I am 2 quests in, haven’t yet managed to eat dirt, an d have hours and hours of things left to unlock.  Knowing they are there to get, and knowing what the benefits are, that’s making this quite an interesting run through.

With WoW fading from view, I’m looking for something else to fill in bits of time.  I have my PS4 connected to a projector in the basement, but since I’m cheap, I don’t have the online services hooked up.  The time played in MHW on the PS4 was solo only.  I did start a recent replay of Horizons, but that time investment will be in fits and spurts.  God of War is still too fresh for a replay… and I unlocked every bit but 3 Valks in the last run.

The gaming laptop has a wide selection of options.  I completed the new season of D3 in a couple days.  Pillars of Eternity is about half way through.  I have an XCOM2 save that I’m holding off on until some of the interesting DLC stuff is out in a few weeks.  Dead Cells and Cuphead are on the wishlist for a rainy day – which seems to be the only type of day around here lately…

Nope, I’m heading back into the MH World.  It’s been a good 3 months since my last battle, and there are still massive amounts of content that I have yet to see.  It will certainly make the multiplayer aspect of that game an option.  There were quite a few battles that made me tear out my hair.  Tempered Teostra is on that list.  Plus, there’s something about the MH model of continual progression that just works.

The strategic layer of targeting specific monsters and making goals… that hits me right in the good spot.  Unlocking new camps, new pieces of food, finally getting that rare drop… feels good man!  The tactical layer of preparing for a battle, laying out the lines and traps. Then the actual battles have great moment-to-moment energy.  The individual phases of health, the set time periods of a battle in a specific location…it’s hard to get bored on any specific battle since they often have something new to add.

I remember farming a Tempered Jyuratodus (the fish one).  8 battles, 8 different fights.  Bazelgeuse joined a few times to throw me off my game.  The various little bits added make for an enjoyable and repeatable game.

I did dual blades last time.  I’m thinking full switch axe this one.  Always one for the glass canon approach.

Less interesting in the game as I am around the aura of the game.

Love the lens focus trick to make them look like miniatures

Recall that Anthem is launching on Feb 22, 2019.  Also note that while we know there are 4 classes, no one really knows what any of them do.  There are 4 people per server… which is more like Diablo 3 I guess, than Destiny?  No one has seen anything other than the demo level.  There’s been no news since PAX, over a month ago.

Oh, there’s some info on how to pre-order, and that the demo launched on Feb 1, and that early access is 1 week before launch.

I do recall when Anthem was being presented as the bee’s knees.  Not so much a Destiny killer (Destiny did that all on it’s own), but certainly as a competitor in the same vein as say, The Division.

In this age of early access, with media leaks all over the place… it’s easy to have an idea of how a multiplayer game is looking many months ahead of time.  It’s a bit surreal to have no real idea of what’s going on in this game at this point.  I can speculate until my head explodes, but why bother?

While I’m sure the developers are doing all they can to make a great game, we are talking about EA.  The company who makes mint off pre-orders.  Maybe they are waiting until the November rush?

As I mentioned a whole while back, I am just getting some popcorn and watching this story unfold.