Given most of the people I randomly group with on ps4 are Japanese... The westerners will have to carry the userbase.

They probably will.

 

It's released. Im downloading. Would be neat if people here added me. Just a couple of my friends bought it so it would help me too.

 

I'll never play on PC unless I can transfer saves, so sorry, no can do

 

I just bought it on Xbone

 

All he does is bitch when you're trying to get style points with an Insect Glaive. Downvote.

 

What's the time investment like for this game? I know it's grindy (or at least other games in the genre are) but if I wanted to play in spurts (like mostly weekends). I'm usually a sword and board kind of guy, but looking at twitch no one ever seems to use anything but 2 handers, is it just not viable at all?

Mostly I'm looking for your opinions on these points:

Punishes you for not playing every day.
Viability of Sword and Shield
Difficulty curve
Ability to maximize your resource usage/planning while not playing

 

The default "base" weapon is Sword and Board, which is probably the reason you don't see it used commonly. It's perfectly viable though, and you can do some good shit with it. There's also a handful of other shield-based weapons (Lance and Gunlance, both of which use shields, and the Charge Blade, which is a sword and shield that generates energy with each attack and can transform into a 2h axe which spends that energy to do bonus damage), and all of them are quite good.

Personally, I'd recommend the Charge Blade, as that's a really fun weapon and it seems like it'd be up your alley from what you're saying, but all of them are viable.

As for time investment, you're looking at a big investment, but in many discrete chunks. Most hunts take ~10 minutes, with a maximum upper limit of about an hour for most, and once you finish a hunt, you're done. If you just play a few hours every weekend, you're looking at a few months worth of content at least, and it's not going to be severely hampered by you putting it down for a week in between sessions. The only real impact that would have is if you forget what's going on with the story, and that's simple enough that it doesn't take long to figure it out again.

 

Just finished the story. IG user... I wanna start farming stuff but I don't know where to begin

 

Monster Hunter, once you get used to the game, is exactly the kinda game you can play on the weekends for months and months. The 'core' main quest can be done in xx hours where xx is your skill level, but the postgame is veery big and can be an almost endless grind for those last perfections for your build. If you like the game, you can easily expect over 100 hours, and hundreds if you really get into the grind. And once you more or less memorize the fights, it won't take your fingers long to get used to fighting them again.

Sword and Shield is viable. Monster Hunter is one of those games where everything is viable, skill and experience trump everything. Just play with your favorite weapons, know how to fight with them, and you'll be good.

World is suited to new players to the series. It definitely does have a difficulty curve, but the main game is very well structured to give you gradually harder and harder monsters. Go ten hours back, and laugh at how simple those monsters are to kill now.

Reading guides what to grind and how to optimally grind can definitely cut your playtime by a lot. Ultimately it's a game about killing big monsters over and over, but if you have a clear roadmap what to do, it'll go faster.

 

Just barely at HR23, playing a few hours tops a week since the weekend of launch.

Currently working on a Vaal Hazak set, but it's pretty slow going. I'm not very good at the horn but I'm using the Teostra horn to kill him. Mostly just need Fangs, which are a bitch and a half to get it seems.

 

Anyone still playing this? I only really got around to this now, and I'm loving it. Very frustrating at times. The biggest problem right now is that I have very few friends that play it, so if anyone want to add me as a friend in Steam to play some hunts, would be great.