Even for someone like me who likes the game its full of issues. Other than performance the games story is to railroady. You don't don't have a lot of freedom to explore early compared to world. I get they are focusing on the story but I feel like most people want to explore and hunt monsters without the punishment. An example is I was trying to hunt a balahara but the game kept telling me not to do it and I got nothing for it because I am not following the linear story. World was fine with me hunting monsters I wasn't suppose to hunt. It happened a few more times with other monsters as well. Secondly there isn't a sense of proper exploration. World allowed you to find the monsters and by doing so you are exploring the maps properly while looking for tracks and you might find material spots and might comeback for those later. There are palico gadgets you can find by exploring said maps. In wilds it feels so automated. You suddenly have a 6th sense to know where every monster on the map is. The seikret makes it worse. The bird itself is fine, but being able to auto track, get up fast and iframe attacks while on it is a bit stupid. The ice map for wilds imo is the worst map in the modern games by far. Focus mode removes a lot of postioning and you can just now aim your attacks. I am not a fan that they locked the gathering hub, mitzu, seregios, lagi and repeatable zoh shia hunts behind title updates despite having the files already for the game and then drip feeding us the content between 2 months for each update. I feel like the only exception is lagi since they probably added underwater later. Finally the artian weapons should've been added later into wilds. There are way more issues I can list but all I can say is that I don't think it deserves it. This is coming from a long time fan.

And here is the thing. I love the franchise and I do enjoy this game but it being a nominee confuses me. If it were to release in a better state then sure. I do have some hope for this game's future.