World of Monstrous Design: The Movie

I’ve been playing a bunch of video games with my friends this year. You may be able to guess why. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing more Monster Hunter: World than I usually would.

I picked it up at the request of a couple of friends, but I did not fall in love immediately. I loved hunting monsters, collecting clues, learning patterns, getting the snot kicked bitten and smashed out of me, and jumping on top of giant monsters to finally get the upper hand. That part is fun. What I didn’t like so much were the incessant tutorials, the cryptic features being spoon-fed to me, and a general lack of empathetic characters other than my own ridiculous creation who I dumped into this world.

I’m writing series to examine some of the flaws in the most popular Monster Hunter title to-date. I’m not a game designer by any means, and I’m not even a web designer, so this is really an opinion piece, and it’s a place for me to note things that professionals in the field have missed. I want to create things that are elegant and self-explanatory, so examining these titans in the industry helps me learn the most difficult things to get right.

Can I Play Now?

First off, I’m not a fan of the movie portion of this game. If you haven’t played Monster Hunter: World yet, or it’s been 2 years since you picked it up, I’ll go over how Capcom opens the game. I timed it, and it’s about 30 minutes of cutscenes before you finally get on your first hunt.

First, you make your character, and the character creation is pretty good! Nothing too extraordinary, but there’s a wide variety of features. Immediately after this is a cutscene. You cannot skip this. Capcom is certain that this is critical that you do not skip this. You’re introduced to 4 or 5 characters: 1 you actually regularly interact with (some tend to not like them for some reason but that’s a side note). And a glaring of cats. Cool, so what does this have to do with the core gameplay of Monster Hunter: World, you might ask yourself, 3 minutes into this “experience.” Well it tells you several things:

1. The game has bad lip sync, not a deal breaker, actually kinda charming
2. There are things called “Elder Dragons,” sounds cool
3. You’re going to the “New World” and your company has been investigating it for 40 years. (Why? Maybe the Elder Dragons)
4. You have a partner (who eats a lot?)
5. You’re something called “A-list,” I’m not sure if this is actually important in the long-run

It takes about 5 minutes of exposition (and character creation) before you’re finally kicked into actually playing the game where you learn how to move your character by, you guessed it, using the left thumb stick or WASD. Riveting.

At least they drop you on top of one of the biggest baddest monsters. But wait, you’re given a bunch of button prompts, and you can’t really fight this monster — you’re on TOP of it. Yeah, the first monster you see is the size of a small island. I’ll admit this looks cool; this thing is HUGE and the whole area is moving around underneath you. I’ll be honest, seeing this in the tutorial you can’t actually fight it, it’s basically still a cutscene.

This whole fist part of the game has basically nothing to do with the core gameplay. Why? I found myself sitting thinking, “Hmm when do I actually get hunt monsters?” Well about 15 minutes in, and for me around 24 hours logged, I felt I was actually playing the game. What a chore.

How to Introduce Yourself

Another Capcom game gets you playing the game as soon as possible: it’s Castlevania! In the super-classics Castlevania 1–4, the game usually starts off by telling you “Dracula is back you gotta go send him back to where he came” gives you a whip and you’re off. Maybe this was because Capcom couldn’t put in a 30 minute cutscene to start off their games on those platforms — cartridge space for NES and SNES were not abundant. Looking at how Capcom started the Resident Evil games in the same era, it’s much slower, but in contrast you can usually skip those cutscenes. Maybe Capcom thinks players want to watch their game instead of play it?

Maybe Capcom is a bad example, so as a modern counter-example I’ll point to From Software’s Dark Souls: a third-person adventure with complex mechanics and fantastical world — sounds a lot like Monster Hunter. In Dark Souls 1 you have a bunch of lore in a cutscene that lasts less than 5 minutes and then you see your character in the Undead Asylum, and some guy drops a body down to you and you’re playing the game. The next cutscene is maybe 5 minutes later (depending on if you get wrecked) and lasts another minute while it takes you out of the Tutorial (into a well designed level 1), and you’re free.

You’re playing the actual game you’re not climbing some tower using mechanics you never use again, you’re not fighting something you’ll never see again, and the game is actually teaching you how it’s core mechanics work. I criticized Monster Hunter for introducing 3–5 characters to you in a cutscene that don’t matter right? In stark contrast, the people you talk to and are introduced to in the first 10(ish) minutes of Dark Souls are all either:

1. Common enemies with simplified patterns you’ll see throughout the game,
2. Characters that are very important to the story of the game, or
3. Characters/NPCs who behave in the same way as others throughout the game

In Monster Hunter: World the only characters that are important to you the player are arguably The Handler who gives you quests and follows you on missions and actually does things with the story that aren’t killing and rupturing things, your cat-like “Palico” companion who fights alongside you on 1 to 2 player missions, and the giant island-sized monster which is important for what I call the “tutorial” section of the game because that giant thing is the focal point of that part of the campaign. Even then, that monster is wildly different from anything else you get from this game: in playing the game for about 30 hours now, it’s the only monster its size and it’s the only monster that you have to climb on like a piece of terrain to fight. Literally everyone else is fluff — you could replace anybody with anybody, or remove them and replace them with a menu and you’d basically get the same experience. Even Capcom didn’t bother making most of them characters because almost none of the NPC’s have names: everyone’s just a placeholder cartoon anime cutout that sometimes prints text on your screen.

Some Constructive Critique

I’d make cutscenes skippable: I’m playing a game not watching a movie. Use the medium. It’s not like your average book makes you listen to a podcast or look at a picture to get started.

I will commend Capcom for using the monster intros to give my opponent more character. But if you want me to have the experience where you show me how the monster interacts in the world… why not show me in the game? For example, the introduction of the “Diablos” is compelling because you have a familiar mud monster approach then you suddenly get the sense that something weird is happening. Suddenly, the earth collapses from underneath the thing and this horned beast appears. Honestly, it’s one of the coolest monster intros in the game. The thing is, this interaction can happen in-game, so why not just do that? When that same interaction happens on hunts it’s frankly terrifying — and that’s great, the Diablos is a really tough monster.

I’m not saying the Diablos intro was bad; I actually like the monster intros, but by the time I actually got to them I had seen about 15 minutes of a movie in the 30 minutes of gameplay, and I get a sinking feeling that I won’t be able to fight this either — luckily I was wrong about that, and I got the snot beat out of me.

Start with the core gameplay loop, or at least allude to it. Capcom takes the beginning of the game and makes a big deal about how you’re going to the New World. That’s fine, but as a new player, I’ve never seen the old world, so watching my character sit on a ship with their presumed friends and coworkers isn’t really engaging as my first experience. Plus if you already have played the other games, sailing to the “New World” isn’t really the fun part: being there is, and you’ll already have the memories from the Old World to give you nostalgia glasses. Even though they really hammer home that this is the “New World,” it’s almost inconsequential because it’s basically the same as the old one! I’m really not sure who this scene is for, and it’s weirdly disjointed from the rest of the game.

Monster Hunter: World doesn’t need to get rid of all cutscenes: you can start games without starting in media res. Mass Effect starts with Captain Anderson, Hacket, and Udina talking about you, Commander Shepherd. This takes a few seconds and in this cutscene Anderson alludes to the ominous plot, and how you are what’s needed to, “Protect the Galaxy,” and you get a blurb about how cool space is. And then in about 2 minutes, you’re thrown into what the vast majority of the game is; talking to people and making Shepherd say stuff, and watching cutscenes that show the story. Great intro, really, because it gets out of it’s own way, and it’s actually the core of the game!

My Monster Hunter: World Intro

If I could design the intro to Monster Hunter: World I’d put your character on a monster hunt with another NPC hunter who’s kinda giving the orders with you and The Handler. Put a sword in your hand and point you in the direction of a monster, that’s the first thing you’d see after character creation. And if the island-sized Zora Magdoros is so important (and it really is), have it interrupt the initial hunt. After you help the NPC Hunter kill or capture whatever you’re hunting, have the island monster blindside you, and you end up on it’s back. The game shows in a lot of other places that the terrain can change wildly, so this seems like it could have worked. Even if that’s not technically possible, how about showing a (short) cutscene then and then do the whole scenario where you fight an island, right? Instead the brief moments before you are told to worry about The Handler before she’s tossed onto the lava monster, you learn that list of facts.

I’m not a designer, but the starting sequence seems so disjointed from the rest of the experience. Even Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, another Capcom game I don’t like, starts off better than this! It’s another movie-for-a-game but it actually tells you the stakes and gives you a hook for the game.

Wrapping up

I’ve ragged on Monster Hunter: World enough for one long article. I want to stress that it’s not a bad game, just a clumsy one, and with some near 0 cost changes it’d be even just slightly better. When Capcom lets you actually play the game it’s a damn fun time. Fighting monsters, crafting gear, learning new mechanics is great. I’m glad I’ve stuck with the game thus far, but by golly it was not an easy game to pick up, and not because it’s complicated, but because it’s obtuse.

If you’re a big Monster Hunter: World fan and think everything I said is a load of garbage, then @ me! Drop me an email here with “World of Monstrous Design” somewhere in the subject and I might make an article that addresses that. I might come back to respond to them, who knows!