I thought I continue my observations on Monster Hinter Tri in a sort of a diary. The game got me big time yesterday. I’m recovering from it now. I was able to leave it at midnight today – yay! I think I’m at a point where I understand most of the game’s systems. I got some online play in and I have defeated 3 big monsters already, even the infamous Qurupeco. Because of Brainygamer’s post I was terrified of that one. Thankfully, due to my newly discovered favorite weapon (Lance FTW) everything went well.
Freeform Hunt
Monster Hunter is so weird, it took me a while to understand how to play it. You start out in a village. You can simply walk out of the village into the wild and start slaying the local fauna or collecting stuff. This is called “freeform hunt” and I actually spent a lot of time doing it at first. Besides freeform hunt you can also take upon quests. When you do so, you are being teleported to a base camp the very same environment as in freeform hunt. You then need to fulfill some task within the time limit. The strange thing is that the time limit is quite generous. It’s 50 minutes – way more than enough for most of the quests.
I didn’t notice it at first so weary of the time limit, I did freeform hunt to gather resources. But this stopped working when a new environment was introduced. Some quests teleport you to places you can’t access via freeform hunt. So in order to gather resources there you need to do it while doing quests. The right way to play it is to take upon an easy quest and use the generous time limit to gather the required resources. Because of this, the freeform hunt is somewhat obsolete. I heard that it was a new addition to the series. It seems like this part is not really polished yet.
Online Play
I got some online play in and it works good. However, you need to jump through a lot of hoops to get there. First, the online mode is a separate game mode that takes place in a different environment (”The City”). Fair enough. You select “city” and you get 4 different categoires of servers. Within each are just a bunch of random servers. After you log into a server you then need to select a “city gate”. After selecting a city gate you actually can walk around in a level so you might think that you can play now, but no. Each city gate has a bunch of “cities”. A city contains 4 players and is somewhat like a game. You can start your own city too. So after you start a city or join one you get to an area where you can buy stuff and take upon quests. You then need to start a quest and wait for players to come to your city and join in your quest in order to play.
This is bullshit.
There are 4 or 5 consecutive layers of decisions that need to be made in order to start playing. Why? Why do I have to select a server? The game gives me no basis on which I could make this decision. It could just as well connect randomly, I don’t care which server I play on. The same goes with city gates – it’s an arbitrary decision that stems from the fact that their infrastructure is built this way. But the user shouldn’t be burdened with it!
Thankfully, once you get in a “city” the rest of the experience is rather smooth. I even got my old keyboard working. The players are generally nice and supportive. And there are indeed no friend codes which is a blessing.
Now, it seems like Barroth is next *gulp*.
accutane
PP colchicine cannabis =-PP