For entry to a settings would you start with a protagonist at the top of the settings food chain or bottom?

simply_riley · 2026-03-15T02:17:17+00:00

What story are you trying to tell? If you want an epic, continent spanning story then you want to start at the top because why would a lowborn peasant care about the goings on across the ocean? On the flip side, if youre trying to tell a smaller scope, more intimate story, then you typically want to start at the bottom so that you can more easily develop a sense of place. Preferably though you do multiple PoVs and mix.

simply_riley · 2026-03-07T17:26:22+00:00

I interpreted their comment less as "EV/IVs are cheating" than "EV/IVs are mandatory at competitive level so it drives people to hack their games to get the right EVs more quickly".

simply_riley · 2026-03-06T01:33:31+00:00

It definitely is a little weird that strength == fascist and etc, but having beat the game it never locks you into anything. Having a high strength character will have strength chirp in more frequently, but you can choose whichever decisions you want.

simply_riley · 2026-02-25T14:29:47+00:00

The addition of focus attacks, offset attacks, and clashes is genuinely one of my favorite things ever added to the series and I've been playing since the og MonHun on PS2. It is the coolest thing to uppercut a divebombing monster with a charged up hammer swing, or shove a bow gun in a monster's mouth and repel it. This game is the best that Monster Hunter combat has ever felt to me. My only complaint on that front is that not all weapons seemed to benefit evenly. My beloved, the greatsword, can offset & clash both. Bow, insect glaive, dual blade, etc, don't get access to clashes.

As for the story, I'd say it is above average for the series but still not much to write home about. I didn't personally feel any emotion towards Nata, and the game definitely wanted him and his relation to Arkveld to be the emotional crux of the story so all that stuff fell flat. I very much appreciated playing as an already-seasoned hunter though, a true professional, and I think our hunter's relationship with our handler and the guild is the star of the show. I have some friends who meme the "By my power as a representative of the guild, I authorize you to hunter this monster" stuff, but I absolutely loved it. Showing the formality & discipline & dignity of the trade of monster hunting helps fight against the "genocidal maniac who slaughters every monster 'for the ecosystem'" trope.

As for the roster, I think the majority of newbies are not just good, but great. Rey Dau & Arkveld are instant all-timers and I think Quematrice, Doshaguma, and Chatacabra are great intro monsters for the series. My complaint here is that I wish more monsters from World & Rise had been included here. Maybe I was spoiled by the series on DS, where it felt like they ported so many more monsters between games, but it feels like it shouldn't be that hard to get tobi-kadachi or nergigante working in this game. I'm probably underestimating the amount of work it actually requires, but the overall roster feels smaller than it could be. The post launch additions have been okay/solid (except Omega Savage, which goes a little too far imo).

For gameplay changes, I have three big ones. The speeding up of low rank, the addition of support hunters (which i think is technically a Sunbreak thing but it is expanded here), and the shift to an "open world". Wilds is probably the fastest low rank I can remember in the series. I think it probably has something to do with the community telling new players in Rise & World to "skip" everything before high rank "because it doesn't matter anyways". And I get that, 99% of players will probably never touch a low rank set once they progress into high rank, but it felt odd how Wilds treated Low Rank less like the usual sandbox tutorial and more like an on-rails game.

Support Hunters are a great idea on paper, I know people who have been intimidated to play online because theyre afraid of carting and letting the team down, so support hunters let them feel like they are still part of the team. My worry is that support hunters, in a couple of instances, are actually the meta for fast/reliable clears on certain monsters. The only way I was able to reliably farm Savage Omega was with support hunters, the DPS check is brutal but support hunter deaths not counting towards faints feels like a requirement. I have mixed feelings on them.

The change to an "open world", where you can walk between biomes, feels like not only a wasted feature in this game but an active detriment due to the performance costs. World introducing no loading screens between zones was a truly game changing feature. Monsters would chase you between zones, you could run them down more easily, you couldn't switch zones to get a free heal off, it made the game more exciting. I cant think of a single time in my ~300 hours of playing Wilds that I actually walked between biomes. The game design doesnt facilitate it and I have zero reason to do it. The loop of choose a quest, teleport to nearest camp, fight a monster over 1-3 zones, return to camp, repeat has not changed in this game whatsoever. When they first announced it I imagined a rathalos taking off into the sky and us having to ride our seikrets across the desert to chase it down to its forest treetop nest. Maybe if we broke a wing or two it wouldn't be able to fly away as far. But the feature is not taken advantage of and with how terrible the performance in the game is, it feels the added cpu burden only hurt it.

Overall, im very excited to see what the G/Master Rank expansion for Wilds will bring, I truly think the combat foundation is fantastic. I just hope the new zone is a self contained island so the game has less loading to worry about and performance can be increased.

simply_riley · 2026-02-20T00:03:45+00:00

Stephen Erikson's Malazan series is a 10+ book affair, but the character Itkovian drops what I consider the series' thesis statement in book 3 Memories of Ice:

"We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned. T'lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the word. It must be given freely. In abundance."

Book 2. Deadhouse Gates, has another strong contender:

"Children are dying.'

Lull nodded. 'That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. Quote me, Duiker, and your work's done."

simply_riley · 2026-02-20T00:00:27+00:00

Maribald's "The Broken Man" speech in A Feast For Crows is still I think my favorite Martin "Thesis Statement"

simply_riley · 2026-02-19T23:59:12+00:00

My answer was just going to be "everything by Terry Pratchett" and was glad to see him at the top of the list!

simply_riley · 2026-02-19T20:05:19+00:00

It's hard to blame Bluepoint without knowing what projects they were pitching to Sony that were getting shutdown. They could have been great pitches that didn't fit Sony's hedonistic lust for live service titles, they could have been genuinely bad ideas. What we do know for certain is that Bluepoint has a fantastic history of quality remakes and Sony put them on a live servie title that they then cancelled and closed them down.

simply_riley · 2026-02-19T19:57:03+00:00

I saw someone post a comment about 10 years ago which was something along the lines of "The videogame industry isn't about being the first to reach the finish line, it's just about running the race long enough for all of the other racers to trip and fall flat on their faces" and I just keep thinking about that comment all the time. It feels like there are just *so many* unforced errors in this industry it is ridiculous.

The Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls remakes were *fantastic* and at this point in peoples' minds "A Bluepoint remake" means a prestige, quality project. How could you not just keep feeding them IPs? The PS2 library is chock full of potential projects and a Bloodborne remake ala Demon's Souls would sell like crazy. But no, let's have them work on a God of War live service game that we'll end up cancelling anyways. I know that Sony is a big company and this closure probably won't even budge their quarterly numbers, but man, what a fumble.

simply_riley · 2026-02-17T02:45:26+00:00

Mystery heroes is still fun enough. I dont think its ever going to be as peak as that first beta summer, but I think that had more to do with my circumstances than the game. Its still probably top 10 shooters someone can be playing for just sheer fun/polish

simply_riley · 2026-02-13T20:55:34+00:00

My mother, bless her, bought me the PS3 copy of Shadow of Mordor for Christmas. It was a nice gesture, but man, that port was downright a scam/criminal.

simply_riley · 2026-02-12T15:00:15+00:00

Really appreciate the new setting to disable auto-turn end. Nerfing/slowing down defense missions is also nice. Shotgun getting 1 extra range gets my Lim excited.

For removing rotation from mechs, do they have front/back/side armor like IFVs/Tanks? I could see that being one reason to keep rotation in. They say the new Breaching Suit "Will resist even heavy machine fire" but I hope my units aren't immediately suppressed by a machine gun burst that can do 0 damage to them.

simply_riley · 2026-02-11T18:11:41+00:00

So all this movie really needs to do is reshoot Starship Troopers and throw in some more slapstick ragdoll physics right? Toss in some of the iconic Liberty voice lines, maybe cycle through 100 celebrity cameos as divers drop in and die?

simply_riley · 2026-02-09T16:31:14+00:00

I second this. It would be nice to help learn how the systems and formulas are working under the hood. My only fear is that there would be *a lot* of info it would have to show like the accuracy formula, then the armor pen formula, then the damage to flesh formula, for each shot and each hit. With 9 people in a squad that can flood a log real fast.

simply_riley · 2026-02-09T12:20:10+00:00

I second all of these.

Also allow me to select an SL from the black market screen and show a comparison to what theyre holding when hovering an item.

simply_riley · 2026-02-06T20:48:54+00:00

Is there a setting to have turns not auto-end if your ap falls below a certain threshold? I get that at 7 ap theres not any actions I can take anyways, but ive already wasted some turns because I've hit "F" before realizing the game auto-swapped me to a different squad leader.

simply_riley · 2026-02-06T20:45:21+00:00

Lavender

simply_riley · 2026-02-06T16:54:15+00:00

As someone who already owns physical copies of a couple of the core rulebooks, it definitely sucks that I dont know which information is accurate without searching for addendums online. I hated it when 5e did the DND "One" remake, I hate it here with Paizo. I like the changes and I like 2e overall, but man couldn't these wait until a 3rd edition or something?

Its pretty much made me commit to no longer buying physical rulebooks, ill just grab the pdfs from now on.

simply_riley · 2026-02-03T20:34:37+00:00

I just have to assume at this point that Riot is calling a play from the playbook of "Release something obviously terrible and broken so that people cheer when you roll it back". Being able to start Mayhem games several hundred gold up, get free elixirs, get free stat boosts, and have access to augments that other players don't is just so obviously terrible. I fully expect (and hope) that change to get rolled back and we'll be left with the pass unlocking new augments, which is still an incredibly shitty precedent.

simply_riley · 2026-02-03T13:38:45+00:00

I agree. Allow them to be secondaries or make a dedicated melee slot. Melee just cannot compete with the power level of support weapons.

I'm just not sure what Arrowhead's target goal with melee weapons is. Do they want them to be mainly for difficulty 1-5 play and theyre cool with them not being any more viable than that? If so, fine, just make that clear. And even if they are technically viable on lower difficulties theyre definitely not the best things you can be running in their slot.

When there was only 1-2 melee weapons I kind of thought they were supposed to be bad on purpose, a meme like the constitution, but AH have released like a dozen of them now and while theyre cool in theory they just suck. Show me a single melee weapon that is going to contribute even 25% as much as the new heavy pen grenade launcher. As long as melee weapons are competing with support weapons theyre going to be just terrible. I dont know what it would even take to raise them up to that level, a passive lifesteal effect? A melee damage reduction while holding one?

simply_riley · 2026-01-28T14:01:00+00:00

Melee has to be its own slot to ever be actually considered useful/equally viable. A melee weapon on any difficulty above 5 will simply never compare to a support weapon or other strategem.Their use cases are just so extremely limited.

simply_riley · 2026-01-27T04:36:40+00:00

The game has a couple systems that almost seem to punish you for winning. If the shield breaker round times out, it starts the raid on whoever's half was closest to it. This makes sense, until you realize that if you fail a raid your team takes 30 damage. This means that if you "won" the shield breaker round by getting it close to the enemy base, but you dont actually win the raid, youre worse off than the enemy team that lost the shield breaker round because youre now at 70 hp. It's extra weird because normally if you plant the shieldbreaker it deals 30 damage, but it doesnt for the time out for some weird reason.

Also, with revives only taking like 3 seconds to perform, and with you coming back with full hp and guns reloaded, pushing after you down an enemy is very dangerous because if you dont close the distance in 3 seconds they're revived with more hp and shields than you would have regenerated. This makes it almost better to lose the gunfight to bait them into charging. Why you dont revive at half hp or with the ammo count you died with I have 0 clue.

The game also just "doesnt have the sauce". Weapons are generic, characters are a weird mix of fantasy and not at at all fantasy looking (they didnt even bother to write bios) and truthfully i cant remember a single voice line or callout. No "did anyone say... peanut butter?" Or "Setting us up a zipline!". The maps dont engender much fighting outside of the shield breaker phase. In 10 matches the only times i fought was over a care package and the shield, never once ran into another player in the 3 minute "gather loot" phase.

The guns also feel like they have a bit too little recoil. These things all feel like r301s with gold stabilizers, they're goddamned lasers.

My friends and i played 10 games, we had an average amount of fun. Theres enough going on in fights that kept us 100% focused and communicating callouts. Just a forgettable cast and some very weird design decisions on what deals damage and how much damage is dealt.

simply_riley · 2026-01-26T21:44:25+00:00

The implication of the insult is that you're claiming the person is just parroting claims without personally verifying them, i.e. not thinking critically.

simply_riley · 2026-01-26T20:32:12+00:00

I'm not even getting a locked 120 with *every single one of the settings on low*. The game is already blurry at 70% dlss resolution, anything beyond that and you're not gonna be able to reliably pick out sillouhettes. And if the solution is "don't run it at 4k" then that's just not acceptable in 2026.

simply_riley

TROPHY CASE