Autumn

Capcom has been doing daily little trailers for the weapons in Wilds in preparation for the playable demo at gamescom this year, which has been pretty cool. I'll admit I'm still not fully sold on Wilds yet, personally, and while some of the weapons have had some cool stuff added... I still find myself struggling to be very excited for the game.

Comments on each after the break, just in case you wanted to go in fully blind for the game.

Lots of info dumps from all kinds of different creators out there, which is nice. Glad Capcom was willing to get it in the hands of so many people to make videos about. They didn't reveal everything I was hoping they would, namely whether decorations are going to be random like in World again or Talismans like in literally every other game. Or a secret third thing! Who knows! I'm hoping for literally anything but random decos, one of the biggest things that caused me to drop World as hard as I did.

I'll only mention the weapons I main specifically, since again I don't really know enough about and any of the others to really comment lol

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Bow: Definitely not really feeling it from what I've seen. The lack of shot types of a giant miss imo and the way coatings work now is... I dunno a little strange? You have to spend meter to get 8 shots of a coating, but they're otherwise infinite. This meter is also shared for the fancy tracer arrow thingy. I foresee an issue with the weapon having competing play styles within itself. Dash dancing is still a thing - this is World bow effectively - and engaging with any of the new features reduces your uptime on that. It's a numbers game, ultimately, I suppose. I suspect dash dancing will rise up to be meta again which is just really disappointing. Not super thrilled with what they did with bow.

Gunlance: Gunlance gang stay winning, I guess? Definitely the weapon of my mains that I'm mostly positive about, haha. From what testing has indicated, it appears shelling damage, to some degree at least, scales from raw. Gunlance doesn't have a "shelling level" stat anymore, and it instead has a shelling "power" stat. I imagine this means some gunlances will have better or worse shelling scaling? Maybe some will favour slaplance and some will favour a more shelling heavy style. Quick reload has a guard point now, it seems? Very cool. You also get two wyvernsfire instead just one, and you can chain them together. Charge shelling is basically a mag dump now, which I think is a fun idea. I hope they still have the strengths for the different shelling types (ie, normal having a larger magazine, long having stronger stakes and wide having better charge.) Overall I'm happy with Gunlance, although I do worry Capcom will be too scared to make it too strong and we'll end up with like 3 viable gunlances in endgame again lol.

HBG/LBG/Gunning, generally: So I have a lot to say about these.

• My worry that pierce and spread were not available to LBG is gone! Hooray! Except... Normal/Pierce/Spread are now all infinite ammo. Their level is not determined by the ammo you shoot but instead the bowgun itself. Ie, this gun has level 1 pierce and spread but level 2 normal. You don't get to pick anymore, what the gun has is what you get. Not particularly happy with this change, personally.
• Normal ammo appears to always be rapid fire now? I think the niche that they want it to occupy is building up meter for the guns which I guess makes sense. LBG appears to be able to augment the volley of shots up from 3 to 5 using the funny rapid fire attachment thingy. I'm mostly fine with this being normal ammo's thing.
• Elemental bullets appear to be simplified back down. There is no longer piercing/normal element bullets. It's possible they have unique behaviour per element? All of them except dragon, I believe, also have multiple levels which are determined by the bowgun itself. These still have to be crafted, although you don't have to craft level 1 or 2, etc separately. It's just thunder ammo and how strong it is comes down to the gun itself. I'm... Fine with this. I like the difference in play between pierce and normal element shots but it is what it is.
• As I feared, the new rapid fire gauge is essentially a strict downgrade from how LBG functioned before. Outside of normal always seeming to be rapid fired, as I mentioned, LBG can no longer rapid fire without spending meter. The bullets you can rapid fire are still limited per gun, but in order to actually use it you must spend meter. Extremely unhappy with this. Locking LBG's... Entire thing??? Behind a meter seems not good, to me.
• HBG seems to have shield baked in, but can no longer tackle or punch things. I will miss bonking things but I suppose it was never actually very useful lol so fair enough. Shielding up and rooting yourself for big damage seems to be the niche for HBG they want to push towards, which I suppose makes sense.
• LBG only gets one wyvernblast now, but gets three of their new focus attack grenade thing. Fair enough.
• The chaser shot thing with LBG seems like it may be interesting. Basically, you root yourself and do a big damage follow up after a volley. You can also step fire which seems like it might make the weapon more agile. Again, I'm fine with this.
• The genuinely awful hit registration and VFX is apparently because they had them turned off in the trailers????? Capcom what are you doing???? You've immortalised how awful that looked in the form of trailers! Utterly baffling choice lmao.
• Recoil and reload stats were not shown on any bowguns. It seemed like they had two mod slots? Unsure if recoil and reload are stats that are intrinsic to the gun and can be improved via skills/mods or maybe it's just a fixed thing now? It could just be that it wasn't implemented in the demo people got to play.

Other thoughts:

• No more bloated raw! No more gendered armour! Both awesome.
• Weapons can have skills on them, this seems novel.
• Set bonuses are back but they apparently are more fleshed out?
• The health bar looks straight up distracting lmao. The way it moves so much makes the UI feel really cluttered and busy. I hope you can turn it down. It also like... Flashes red to warn you a big scary attack is coming? Strange.
• Mini map is 3d! Reminds me of like... Metroid Prime almost? A good solution to the verticality issue.
• The smart potion button seems neat, although it does hinge on you bringing multiple types of potions with you which may not always be true.
• It appears hot/cold drink is coming back. I think it's kind of a pointless exercise in using an item with the way 5th gen games functioned. Like in the old games if you forgot them welp abandon the quest, grab them, come back. In 5th gen it was just "oh go back to camp grab them problem solved." It's just a minor inconvenience and I don't fully understand why people care so much about it outside of some vague sense of "immersion." Not a huge deal, though.
• Paintballs???? It feels a tad redundant when it's already confirmed that scoutflies are back but I guess you can use them to mark areas now, too?
• I guess there's a small mini game associated with cooking now. You have to prep it yourself and it's more involved than before.
• Really not a fan of the art direction so far. It feels very... I dunno, early Xbox 360 how much brown and bloom filter can we cram in. It may be a consequence of the only map they've really shown being a desert.
• NPC hunters are back from Sunbreak, it seems. I'm happy about that. Sometimes I just don't want to gather friends together to play and it's a great feature.

Overall, regrettably, I'm still not particularly enthused about the game. The changes to the main way I engage with monster hunter - LBG - I do not like the look of. Whether or not random decorations make a return is looking like the make or break thing for me and it sucks that that's how I'm feeling. I really wanted to care about this game but they're just doubling down on so much I didn't like about World and it's hard to muster up a strong desire to play it.