Introduction
Monster Hunter World is a Japanese Role-Playing Action Game by Capcom. The main mechanics involves hunting various types of monsters in the game using a decent variety of weapons. The player will progress through the story and complete hunts of increasing difficulty as they build their character up by making new equipment with materials obtained from hunts.
Game Website: https://www.monsterhunterworld.com/
A cool speed run on one of the monsters in the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjRvh7NxX6Q
Feelings/Experiences
I will now talk about some of the feelings/experiences in the game through various lenses.
Lens 9 – Elemental Tetrad
Mechanics
- Hunts
- During a hunt, there is always an objective and sometimes a timer. Failing the objective or having the timer run out will lead to an unsuccessful hunt. Succeeding or failing the hunt brings the feeling of joy or frustrations respectively to me.
- Combat
- The player can pick between various weapons. Every one of the weapons allow the player to perform a set of smooth and flashy moves. This allows me to feel powerful.
- There are also moves that require the player to have precise timing to execute to either dodge attacks or counter them. I feel a sense of achievement when mastering some of these mechanics.
- Loot system
- The player must acquire loots from monsters in a hunt to upgrade their equipment. The loots are often random. When I get a rare loot that I need from a hunt, I feel a lot of excitement and joy.
- Event monsters
- Some of the monsters or monster variants only appear in events. This is where players can take on some of the most powerful monsters in the game. It can be frustrating for me when I must keep retrying the tough monsters.
Story
The game’s story does not add much to my experience in my opinion. This is because the story only takes up a small portion of my playtime. Most of the playtime will be the farming in between the story quests and in the post story mode where the player fights monsters of various difficulty to upgrade their gear to the fullest and take on various tougher monsters that comes out during events.
Aesthetics
The aesthetics is amazing on consoles. It is even more so on the PC with the high-resolution texture packs. The area aesthetics often follows the theme of the monsters that the player will be fighting the first time. This level of detail makes all the player actions look and feel cooler and allows for nice screenshots.
Technology
With the advancement of technologies, we now have very fast processors. This allows for the combat mechanics to include precisely timed actions and responsive inputs. If the processor is slow, the combat can feel sluggish, making the player feel slow and weak. In addition, with the current graphic processors, the current high-resolution aesthetics can be achieved.
Lens 8 – Problem Solving
While the game looks like a simple hack and slash game, I experienced some form of problem solving like building a suitable set of equipment and figuring out a fighting strategy for a hunt. Being able to conquer a hunt with my build gives me a sense of achievement.
Lens 32 – Goals
Initially in the game, the obvious goal would be to complete the story. in between that, I will see that each hunt or equipment upgrade will be a smaller goal to achieve before the end of the story. After the story missions are completed, the player is free to set their own goals as the game will simply provide more hunts for the player to play and continue upgrading. For me, I started setting small goals on farming various equipment pieces with the bigger goals of clearing the tougher hunts. This kept the game fresh for me as I always feel a sense of achievement and pride whenever I manage to clear the goals and I always have something to look forward to.
Lens 34 – Skill
When fighting the toughest monster in the game, equipment is not the only thing that is needed. It requires some degree of mastery of the combat mechanics. With the progressive mastery of combat, I can feel the excitement of being able to defeat the tough monsters and can challenge myself to kill it faster.
Lens 38 – Challenge
The game provides challenges appropriate for any level. This allowed me to feel more encouraged to clear the challenge as I did not ever feel stuck or hopeless. At the start, the player can clear challenges by being very mechanically skilled or being hardworking and farming for better equipment to clear the challenging hunt. Only when going into the toughest of monsters where the player will have to start relying more on their skills.
