I’d say the opposite. They have streamlined the experience too much where it mattered. No longer do you need to track monsters and paintball them, no more farming for resources in preparation for a hunt, early monsters are all a joke that pose no real challenge, and in the new one you don’t even have to explore the map, as your mount is an auto-pathing machine that can take to your next hunt or quest automatically.
I think we’re taking about the same thing, actually. When the maps were small 2D areas that connected at set points, I was able to learn them well without any special effort. With experience one could bypass the paintball system by having learned a monster’s likely behaviors, which was extremely satisfying.
Now we have the auto-tracking features which render navigation mindless, along with maps existing in 3D and on much larger scales and interconnecting in more complex ways. When I’ve attempted to ignore the navigation system and do things manually I find it very difficult, which I have to assume is why they added the navigation in the first place.
My memory isn’t as clear as I’d like for this kind of discussion, but I remember something like a single button being both start climbing and also jump off the thing you’re climbing or something like that? And then if I wanted to jump off a cliff it was a different button from what I’d been lead to expect in other contexts? So I’d just constantly be accidentally using the wrong inputs because they were too context-reliant, and it made it extra difficult to navigate and gather. The controls used to be a lot simpler, and we didn’t have any of this hookshotting around with bugs or super dogs. Saying the controls used to be simpler and 100% meaning it is hilarious coming from someone who played on PSP. How did you make me prefer the claw, Capcom? Maybe I was just used to the old way and can’t adapt; I just remember things being more straight-forward in terms of actual gameplay.
I could also really do without action games bogging themselves down with lengthy dialogs and cutscenes. If I wanted to watch a movie or read a book or play an RPG I would just do those things. I don’t need an epic lore motivation for stabbing dinosaurs. This series barely had dialog when it started out, and the voice lines were delightfully world-buildy and flavorful by not being any real-world language. Less was more in terms of immersion.
Oh, yeah. I think we are both complaining about the same thing. I remember a lot of dialogue on previous Monster Hunter vanes, but it was usually only on some rare occasions. This one feels too story heavy, and I agree, if I want to watch a movie or read a book, that’s what I’ll be doing. I want my games to let me game.
