Welcome to the first in a series of endgame reviews. What I want to achieve with these is to give some deeper insight of different games I’ve played as soon as I am entirely done with them, either because I “finish” them, get tired of them or something happens to them.
I’d like to start with Monster Hunter Tri (click for the original article) . This one I traded in for Metroid: Other M. In story mode I never really beat it but I got pretty far. In online mode I got to the exact middle of the “ranking” spectrum.
I really liked this game, and I still recommend it. Sometimes I think I traded it in out of impulse, only because I was REALLY hyped about Other M. It was fun to play and I still had a lot I could do.
The only issue I had was with online matchmaking. It was truly frustrating at times. I simply don’t know what the hell they were thinking when they set the servers up like that. I can think of a thousand ways they could have made finding a good group to play with a lot easier, especially when they already had a ranking system.
You literally have to log in to one “server”, log in to a “gate” and look through all of the “cities” for a suitable group that is close to your ranking and not in the middle of a quest. Then you have to convince them to go hunting whatever it is you’re hunting. Sure, there were “recruiting” servers that allowed you to specify, in a city you opened, what your immediate goal was; but each “gate” within was entirely separate so you still had to do the in-out search, and of course, most players were in the regular servers anyway.
The connection to a server and then a gate is done via the game’s main menu, but from that point forward you have to navigate the gate as your avatar which adds the game’s loading to the wait. There is no point really to being in a “gate” except that you could chat there or use the in-game messaging, which is done via menus, anyway.
There is a “friend roster” function but it is a pain in the butt. The navigating through menus and asking for permission… You could only send messages to your friends if they were standing by, not when hunting (basically barely ever). Then, when you finally get a hold of them you can’t join them because there are already 3 more people in their “city”, or they’re busy doing a specific quest. There was no offline messaging, either, even though the Wii supports an in-console inbox. That was just stupid.
This system would have worked if this were another kind of game, but not for a game in which groups of no more than 4 players go on an epic battle that could last about an hour and requires some minutes of getting ready. That’s a lot of waiting.
Part of the blame for this actually goes to the game community (or to the game designers relying too much on player cooperation). You see, in this kind of game there are no experience points, you earn the experience yourself, and you can share it with new players. Even when you’ve reaching the “endgame” content where you have the best weapons and armor, the first monsters are still fun to hunt and, while not terrifyingly challenging, they can still kill you in a few hits if you don’t apply the same strategy you learned as a newbie. Also, there are usually sub quests and sometimes even (tougher) monsters not involved in the mission running wild that you could hunt for fun and profit.
What I’m trying to say is that if experienced players didn’t mind playing with newbies, everybody would always have a group to play with. But the old players are too selfish, only hunting creatures that would give them decent rewards or even concentrating in one specific monster for the parts they need for an upgrade. It takes a good deal of begging to have them join your hunt. On the other hand, some newbies will literally go gather herbs and mushrooms and let the experienced players do the killing, only to show up at the last minute to carve parts out of the cold carcass. Too bad you can’t PK them.
Maybe Japanese players have figured this out over the course of many iterations of the franchise, therefore not needing a more complex matchmaking system, but a more refined matchmaking system would’ve been of benefit to hardcore players or newcomers from across the pacific. When I applied the mantra I just mentioned I’d always find a party. I’d always make an amount of cash relative to the amount of effort (I could always sell the parts I didn’t need) and it was fun showing off in front of the newbies, especially when a tougher monster showed up and I was all like “We’ll keep the Rathian busy while you n00bs hunt the Qurupeco!” It was also fun when tougher players joined us n00bs and showed us how it was done. Players like these I’d add to my roster, and they’d often add me, we were among the few that really got it. But one cannot play like this all the time. Eventually we all want to rise through the rankings and to get the best weapons and armor, and it’s really frustrating when you’re the only one cooperating.
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