Gaming
Monster Hunter: World’s Mechanics Clash with the Concept of Loot Boxes
Loot boxes are quickly becoming far too common in games. Sure, they might be (somewhat) acceptable in free-to-play games, but many argue that including loot boxes in games you have to pay for, especially when the boxes give players tangible advantages over players who don’t buy loot boxes, goes too far. Well, Monster Hunter fans don’t have to worry about loot boxes in Monster Hunter: World, since they are at odds with the game’s mechanics.
During an interview with Gamespot, series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto stated the following when asked about loot boxes in Monster Hunter: World:
“I think that Monster Hunter has already built that kind of randomized, item reward into the gameplay. Whenever you carve a monster after a hunt, you don’t know what you’re gonna get within a certain range. You’ve got certain rare parts that you almost never get. You’ve got some of the ones you don’t need that you get a lot of. And then there are the rewards for the quest as well. There are some [rewards] that are standard, there are some that are randomized, and a big bigger or smaller chance of getting them. You’ve already kind of got loot as a core gameplay aspect without having to shove a microtransaction version of it in.”
As a Monster Hunter veteran, I know all to well the frustration of hunting a monster over and over again for the one item I need to craft a new weapon or piece of armor yet never getting it, forcing me to hunt the monster numerous times (I think the most I ever hunted one monster for a specific reward is around twenty) until I finally carve out that long-awaited rare item. Yet, I never had to pay a dime for these items, and more importantly, I enjoyed these hunts. Sure, it counts as grinding, but you know a game is good if it makes grinding for loot enjoyable, and not out of a “one more time” mentality. If Monster Hunter: World implemented microtransaction loot boxes, Tsujimoto feels it would ruin the experience, as the point of the game is to hunt monsters, not pay money for the option to skip the experience. Either way, there’s no guarantee a player will even get the item he or she wants, so why bother paying for a roll of the dice when you can just roll them for free?
Game director Yuuya Tokuda shared Tsujimoto’s sentiments in a separate interview:
“I wouldn’t see a paid loot box or paid system for getting random items as fitting Monster Hunter because it isn’t a game where the strength of the items is the key aspect of how you proceed. The idea is that the time you spend hunting and the action part of the game is how you brush up on your skills. And then of course you get rewards of better items; but by skipping out on the part where you get better and hunt — if you’re simply getting more items — I don’t think that’ll be a very satisfying experience for players because it wouldn’t even necessarily make it that much more of a time saver if you haven’t got the skill to use the items you’ve gotten.”
Likewise, game director Kaname Fujioka (in yet another interview) echoed Tokuda’s argument that Monster Hunter is built around the concept of getting better at hunting monsters, receiving items as a reward, using those items to make better armor and weapons to hunt even stronger monsters, and then rinsing and repeating in perpetuity. TL;DR version: the developers behind Monster Hunter: World will never put loot boxes in the game because it defeats the purpose of the game, which is to essentially “git gud.” If only more game developers thought like that.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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