All right! I'm new to the series, but am really looking forward to trying this new one out. I played a bit of the beta on psn however long ago, and it seemed interesting.

I might just skip the last beta. I'm pretty excited to play this, but the lack of permanence and progression really takes a lot away from the game for me. It makes me wonder if the beta actually turned off anyone from the full game without realizing what was missing.

@zeik: I've definitely seen a lot of new players wondering what the actual "progression" or "gameplay loop" is, which the beta is pretty misleading on. I said to myself I'd avoid this last one as it's so close to launch, but the draw of the Nergigante fight and a 4th consumable pack for launch is drawing me back in...

Goddamn - that final trailer has me hyped as hell. Elder dragon turf wars look fucking amazing. And Deviljho is always great to have back. That thing has so much character and presence; it's awesome.

And yeah, Nergigante is not gonna be easy in this upcoming beta. His movesets look like they might be hard to anticipate and counter. Probably not gonna go for a slow weapon for this one.

Huh, well, this is neat news for those of us hoping for more Monster Hunter World coverage from Giant Bomb duders. At 56:14 of today's Steal My Sunshine - Episode 17, this exchange took place:

Dan: "I have to figure out what [platform] I'm playing Monster Hunter World on."

Alex: "That's not a sentence I ever expected to hear."

Abby: "Switch?"

Dan: "No, I wish it was on Switch. I've got a team of four that I'm definitely going to play with."

Abby: "It's a multiplayer game?"

Dan: "Oh yeah."

Alex: "Is Jason one of those people?"

Dan: "No. My wife, Tim Turi, and Ben Hanson. We're gonna all give it a shot."

I wonder if Dan might possibly coordinate schedules with Jason, Ben, and possibly Brad to play this thing together with them as well when it comes out. It certainly sounded like Jason was expecting to make it an ongoing feature with Ben. But at the very least I guess we can expect to hear Dan's take on the Beastcast. Anyone have predictions of how he'll take to it? Love it, hate it, somewhere in between?

@atheistpreacher: Nice catch! I'm well behind on Steal My Sunshine. I hope one of those four have some experience with previous Monster Hunter games, as I'd love Dan to get way into it (seems like the perfect thing for him and his wife to play side by side, the game lends itself really well to learning with a friend).

Tim Turi has some experience:

Plus, y'know, he now works for Capcom. :-D

Per this video, apparently Tim is a Hammer guy.

Well considering danhatesmonsterhunter.com exists I'm honestly not expecting much.

@gukiguy said:

But what about "New Dan"? :-D :-P

I dunno, I'm cautiously optimistic that he might actually get to a place where he at least gets the appeal of the core gameplay loop, now that he's got a group of people who will be pushing him along through the early parts. We shall see.

Close enough that I can taste it. Also might fire up MHXX on Switch tonight in expectation, even though it's cumbersome with the language barrier and not having muscle memory of MH gameplay (yet). Hope Capcom eventually pays a fan $5 to translate it for them.

@ripelivejam said:

The crazy part is that of course MHX was already translated as Monster Hunter Generations. Since MHXX is just the G-rank expansion, half the game is translated already.

But it's easy to see why they wouldn't want to do a release of a last-gen game that would distract attention away from their big next-gen game that's supposed to finally crack the western market. I would not be at all surprised to see MHXX get a western release six months to a year after World, when they're satisfied that World has achieved most of its western sales (no guarantee, but I really think this is the main factor stopping them). But until then, we'll just have to do without an English MHXX.

Monster Hunter world looks like it could be a lot of fun. I guess I'll find out in the Fall. That PC release announcement was a real bummer.

I'm annoyed that Best Buy isn't doing the $10 preorder credit for this game. No choice now but to hop off the hype train and wait for reviews.

So the third beta is live now. It runs through 6pm Pacific on Sunday. Then the full game is out on Friday.

That fourth quest against the new flagship monster, Nergigante, is pretty tough. Took me a number of tries to beat it, even as a veteran. New hunters will probably find it very tough going. If you were playing it before and didn't think the challenge was there, check it out.

Add me on psn if you feel like showing a rookie the ropes,sn: floorbored probably will end up getting the pc version but the ps4 beta/ renting it will be my thermometer

i've never played a monster hunter before, but always liked the idea of it. I just played the beta the first two missions, but i'm not getting a good feel for the moment to moment gameplay really. Is it just hunting the big dudes or are you free to do other stuff? I just feel the big battles don't really happen that organicly? or maybe that's just the beta?

The fighting is fun and exciting though, although i sometimes do moves i can't repeat. Like i was playing with the dual blades and i suddenly jumped off a wall and didn't know how the heck i did that :D

It's mostly doing quests where you hunt big monsters, or sometimes small monsters. I don't know about World but in previous games there were also gathering quests so you can just safely go harvest materials for bullets/potions/etc, plus some dumb ones like go steal a Rathian egg and turn it in at the camp (these quests sucked). But for the most part, it's hunting. There's also a free hunt exhibition area with no timers where big monsters will appear.

Hunt big monsters, kill them, get their parts, make new equipment that will help you kill other monsters. Stuff like, oh hey I need a fire weapon because my next hunt is weak to fire, maybe I'll kill a bunch of Rathalos and make some dual blades from his parts, those will be Fire element.

So far i like it only got to try out some weapons and hunt the first monater solo but it feels good to control and looks great. Might pick this up on pc at some point.

Only thing i dont like is the inventory system, cycling through all that shit is cumbersome as hell. Besides that i like the game a lot so far.

Finally jumped back in and finished the remaining quests to get packs in the full game. Can't wait, 5 more days, my first Monster Hunter! It definitely at least partially fills that craving for Dragon's Dogma 2. So hyped to play the full experience. Combat and movement felt weird at the beginning but I'm getting more and more used to it. I'm probably going to spend hours in the character and palico creators themselves. Plus semester break is starting at uni so I'll have plenty of time to hunt monsters! Hype!

@oursin_360: I haven't had time to exploit it much yet but I feel the radial menu was added to alleviate that.

Can I get some help with nergigante please?

Psn: OmegaIzanagi99

@ripelivejam: i think i missed that, i can only go back and forth for healing items etc. Will have to look for that

@oursin_360: While you're holding down the L1 button to cycle through items it will also bring up the radial menu that you can navigate with the right stick. It's honestly one of the best additions to World.

@oursin_360 said:

Yeah, I haven't checked, but it seems like you can carry way more different types of items so there are tons of items to scroll through. The item wheel shortcut can be a bit cumbersome too since I've accidentally used the health booster so many times. But it does help when you need to get to your whetstone or mantles.

There's a setting where you use the item upon clicking the right stick instead of using it upon releasing the stick. This makes it much easier to use and you don't accidentally use items as a result.

Somewhat on-topic - I managed to beat Nergigante last night! Can't wait for the full release.

By the way, Heavy Bowgun looking pretty broken in this last beta.

Fastest melee times were around 4 minutes.

Those people are just freakish, though. I managed to solo Nergigante in 12:05 with Lance and 10:48 with Hammer (also several times in groups). The Hammer time I'm pretty happy with despite the fact that some Japanese guy did it in half that.

Four days now until release. Gonna be pure torture. At this point I have no drive or desire to play anything else.

Yeah, that might be the most important setting to change, I was likewise using a lot of items by accident without switching to the other type.

A couple other helpful options to toggle when the full release happens:

Auto-sheathe. On by default, this will automatically sheathe your weapon if you run around with it out and don't attack for a certain period of time. No good reason not to toggle this off, since there are situations when you'll want to keep your weapon out. Easy enough to sheathe yourself.

Camera zoom. You can set the camera distance a little closer or a little further away from your character. I always set it to "far," because more situational awareness is always better.

Also, it's just cosmetic, but there's an option to hide your helmet so that you can see your hunter's face that you spent so much time customizing.

There are also some options to make the controls behave more like the older games, but I didn't really mess with these, since the control changes seem like good ones overall.

Yeah, that run is nuts. It's mainly exploiting the flame pods, keeping Nergy paralysed on top of them does some insane damage. I think they did a similar thing to G. Jagras in the first beta. Even so, I've seen sub-4 min runs done with the HBG without cheesing the flame pods.

@bollard said:

Hopefully they'll actually fix the stuff that's broken. Monster Hunter has never been on a console that was set up to receive patches, so the broken aspects just sorta stayed broken.

Kinda related, my brother was hoping to maybe main Gunlance this game, but I don't think we've gotten definitive word on whether the explosive damage from the shelling scales up properly in this game. In past games it didn't, meaning the Gunlance was great early on but bad in the late-game. Hopefully that's fixed, and if not, hopefully they'll patch in a fix at some point...

First time playing the beta, stayed on a ton during the weekend.

This game is exceeding my expectations right now goddamn. It just feels and looks so freaking good. I ended up trying just about every weapon and kept going even after finishing all the missions a handful of times.

I love that they added Nergigante and made it a fairly harsh timer as an added challenge. The first 3 fights were pretty easy, even when our squad was two complete newbies, me with some minor experience and a vet. But Nergigante took like 2h and some blood sweat and tears to take down, you could see rapid progress in us learning the game by doing that, and goddamn was it satisfying to finally take him down after all those failed attempts. We were all pretty much sold on pre-order after that (don't tell anyone I did that, it's bad)

Longsword seems to be my best fit, I felt like I had good sticking power to keep the damage up, and I got into a good rotation with leveling up and using the helm breaker. I would really like to learn greatsword though, but it's been a bit of a struggle to use it efficiently. I'm like ok against the beta monsters now because I know their patterns, but it's still not nearly as efficient as LS.

@tobbrobb said:

Greatsword is definitely one of the hardest to use because it probably requires the most knowledge of monster behavior. Attacks come out so slowly that unless you can predict what a monster is about to do, you're going to wiff a hell of a lot of hits.