160,000 people can’t be w♈rong, right? Despite launching more than five years ago, Monster Hunter World is one of the most popular games on Steam right now. Its average concurrent player count is five times higher than the much newer Monster Hunter Rise, and it peaked this weekend with more players than the game has seen since Iceborne launched in 2020. Between the Monster Hunter Wilds announcement, the recent Steam Sale, and the fact that it’s just a dang good video game, 2018’s Monster Hunter World is back in the zeitgeist and I couldn’t be happier about it.
I put hundreds of hours into Monster Hunter World on PS4, but never got into it𒁏 on PC. Booting it up for the first time in nearly four years felt like coming home, and while I played and enjoyed Rise, World remains the undisputed champ of the Monster Hunter series. It’s easy to see why people are flocking back to it even after all this time. That was my first reaction, my second reaction was, “Dang, this game has aged a lot worse than I thought.”
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༒Part of that reaction was due to the surprisingly low quality of its textures, which make the game look muddy and dull by today’s standards. Thankfully there’s an easy fix for that if you know where to find it. The High Resolution Texture Pack is a free DLC update you can find on World’s store page. The game won’t prompt you to download it, but it’s a must-have add-on that will only cost you about 50GBs of spa🍎ce.
Even after solving the graphics issue, I’ve still been struck by how outdated Worlds feels. The Monster Hunter series is well known for having a lot of friction. There’s a lot to learn and many of its systems come across as tedious and cumbersome to the uninitiated. Monster Hunter World is often celebrated for the way it modernized and streamlined a lot of the clunky parts of the series, and while the 🌳game holds up in a lot 🐻of ways, there’s still a lot of changes I’d like to see in Wilds.
It’s baffling that you can’t skip any of the cutscenes. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some great cutscenes in World, but as a veteran player looking to rush my way thro﷽ugh the campaign, the cinematics are just getting in the way. W💦hen Iceborne launched, Capcom added a weapon and armor set called the Guardian set to help new players breeze through the main campaign and get to the expansion quicker. The devs recognize that players want to get through the story quickly, but the game still forces you to watch hours of cutscenes no matter how many times you’ve already seen them.
This becomes a big issue when t꧋rying to play with friends. I remember how frustrating it was to deal with all the hoops you have to jump through to play co-op when I first played World in 2018, but it’s even harder to deal with now that Rise has shown us there’s a better way. Here’s how almost every story mission has to go if you want to play with your friends: each player will launch their own mission separately, go to the hunting ground, and track down the monster. Once the monster’s introduction⛎ cutscene plays, all but one person will abandon the mission, scroll through the mission end screens, then return to the Gathering Hub, then, while one player is still fighting their monster, everyone else will go the mission board, join the mission, do all of their mission prep like eating and inventory management, then depart for the mission. By the time the rest of the party shows up for the fight, the person that started it is usually a full phase through the battle. It’s an absurd way to handle multiplayer, and it makes getting through the story with friends feel like such a slog.
What’s surprised me the most about returning to World is how much I’m missing Rise’s Wire Bug. That’s bound to be 😼a controversial take and, broadly speaking, I think the Wire Bug is what makes Rise’s combat less interesting and challenging than World’s. Butꦡ for the sake of getting around each Biome, I miss being able to launch myself across half the map.
The focus on mobility largely defines Rise, which makes World feel very slow by comparison. Chasing monsters after they flee from the fight can be a whole ordeal, especially on maps like the Ancient Forest and Cor𝔍al Highlands where they can escape to the top of a mountain you have to pain💝stakingly climb. Getting carted is so punishing when you realize how far you have to walk to get back to the fight. This is also what makes unlocking new camps throughout each map more rewarding, but traversal is still a huge chore in World, even with Iceborne’s Clutch Claw.
My biggest pain point of all is the same one I had when the game first launched: ??? Quests. World was the last Monster Hunter game to maintain the series' tracking mechanics before Rise abandoned them completely, and while a lot of the track-gathering and research-development features work well, the ??? Quests are so unfathomably drudgerous, they completely destroy the pace of the game. The first one you encounter at the beginning of High Rank is a Pink Rathian quest, and the only way to find the monster is to aimlessly wander around each biome until you’ve collected enough tracks to find it, and it’s way, way more work than it should be.
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Note: Don’t even get me started on Zorah Magdaros, the biggest slog of all time. Those m🥀issions are a miserable stain on this incredible game, and I would need an entirely separate article to go through all the things that are wrong with that monster♎.
I understand the intention here. You’ve just started High Rank, there’s new things to see and materials to collect, little changes to the maps, and new missions to take on. The game wants to break you out of your rhythm so you’ll go out and explore instead of just grinding through each hunt. It would be fine if the tracks were plentiful and easy to find, but they are so hard to find, and it takes so long to find them. I’m trying to blow through♓ High Rank to get to Master Rank, but the ga💟me keeps forcing me to stop and smell the roses.
If you’re new to World, don’t let these things disc𝓰ourage you. It’s still a masterpiece and I’m having a great time replaying it even after all these years, but it also hasn’t held up quite as well as I remembered. As approachable as it may be by Monster Hunter standards, there’s still a lot of frustrating, and fr🌠ankly boring things about it. I’m excited to see how Wilds pushes the series forward next year, because as good as World is, Monster Hunter still has plenty of room to grow.
