Bird Summoning Circle

I’m Merlin. If we’ve met elsewhere before, you may remember me as (in order of most recent to “oh god did you really meet me 15+ years ago??”) Daps, Adapa, or Nil. My pronouns are they/them and I’m 34 years old. I’ve been using Tumblr since 2010, though most of it wasn’t under this account. I’m kind of a hermit and enjoy following few blogs and keeping my dash quiet and manageable.

I work in software development, and I enjoy game dev and drawing in my spare time. I haven’t released any games to speak of, but I like to build game design tools and the project I’m proudest of so far is probably qurobullet. I’m also a furry so art-wise you can expect mostly creatures of various kinds.

at first i thought it was just bc it didn't have G rank stuff, bc that's where i tend to sink all my time in other monhun games... but then i recently saw a clip of the gameplay again and it hit me

it's the wound mechanic that killed it for me.

basically, starting in Wilds, if you hit a monster a bunch in the same spot, it'll get a "wound" there, and every weapon type has a unique special ultra-damaging move you can use on it when it appears. it was a fun new idea and it actually feels really good to do... but that ends up being exactly the problem.

it's such an exciting and powerful attack that you're basically always gonna go for it. there's never a reason not to, and they can happen incredibly frequently. it changes monsters from feeling like living creatures you're in a life or death struggle with into more like treat dispensers. everyone's just waiting for wounds to appear so they can capitalize on them and don't really have to think about their attacking strategy much more than that

having started in the MH3 era, it's unfortunately just the pattern the games have followed since then. I've watched a really weird, interesting, and very niche experience slowly get sanded down into a flatter, more cinematic, mass-market-appealing product. armor pieces no longer have downsides attached to them, so it's very easy to get builds that feel superpowered (even moreso than your usual hunter lol). you can freely swap out your equipment and inventory during a hunt now, so it feels less like you're going on an expedition that needs careful preparation and more like you're playing in your back yard and can run back inside at any time if you forgot something. all attacks have damage numbers now, so you always know exactly when and where your attacks are and aren't effective, rather than having to intuit effectiveness from things like if your attacks break a part or stagger the monster.