Monster hunter wilds feels like it sanded down every rough edge monster hunter had until all that's left is combat. Grinding has been reduced to the point where farming gear takes around four hunts for an entire set. Exploration and map knowledge where made irrelevant by the Seikret autopiloting you to the monster. The focus mode makes positioning irrelevant because you can track your attacks in any direction all the time. Gathering is made irrelevant by the ability to gather at range while auto piloting. Making weapons is irrelevant because they added RNG weapons that outclass everything else at the third village. Every possible sticking point between you and doing the story quest is gone and without it you are left with a short easy boring campaign. Friction in games is good, you need barriers to overcome and goals to work towards. Part of the satisfaction of monster hunter is learning how to get around these hurdles. Making a set to gather ingredients and doing side quests to unlock the farm was infinitely more satisfying than yoinking them from Seikret back. Grinding to get gear slows you down makes you learn the monster movesets and adds to the play time. Learning the map makes you feel more immersed and rewards people who put in the effort. Wilds looked to MH: World and MH: Rise and learned the wrong lessons from both. The immersion, charm, and attention to detail pail in comparison to World. The combat and buildcraft can't hold a candle to Rise. MH: Wilds, is a caricature of Monster Hunter with a boring story, forgettable character and a pathetic runtime. The game also runs terribly even if in the future this game is patched into a playable state we can't forget that this is what people spent 70$ on. Just play Rise and World they are infinitely better than this sludge.

Its clear that the path forward for the Monster Hunter series Devs is to strip out, minimize, or straight up remove any and all aspects of the series in a desperate attempt at mass appeal. They learned the wrong lessons from Worlds success and it is killing the series.

Let me be more specific:

1.) Gathering is essentially gone. Most situations that normally required you to have an item on you such as a status effect, area effect, or source of healing has a readily available alternative in the environment or from the palico. Area too hot or cold? Here is a bug. Poisoned? Here is a bug if your palico didn't already immediately remove the status. Got hit? Your palico is already bringing a almost full health heal for you. At least you still have the option to have items with you but at this point, with how you can teleport straight to any camp mid fight, there really isn't any reason for a separate inventory. I'm sure the next game will remove that too.

2.) Armor and weapon costs are far too low. They already realized this with the release of Lagiacrus and Seregios. They bumped up the crafting costs for those monsters to require one 1% drop rare part for each armor piece and weapon upgrade. Too bad they aren't actually 1% drops though. They are in reality a 400% drop. You see monsters can spawn on the map with guaranteed drops. That can include the 1% rare drop. Since you can spend a pitifully low 500 resource points (which you'll be drowning in) to save the spawn as an investigation you have 4 full opportunities to get the part 100% guaranteed. Worried you wont have enough Zenny to craft it? Not to worry! You'll be a multi-millionaire by high rank! Money is never an issue and you'll never need to sell a single thing. Which is good because you'll need every part possible to grind into armor spheres, upgrade ores for the artian weapons, or to roll for talismans. Most of your time playing the endgame of this game will be hunting monsters for things that dont pertain to that monster in anyway at all. They're just loot boxes with a minigame.

3.) Combat:
Why did they feel the need to mess with the combos for weapons in this game? They're just different for no good reason. All the moves are still there they just felt the need to rearrange them around. It just feels bad for no benefit. Focus mode is too OP and breaks the combat design of Monster Hunter completely. Implemented assumedly for the new wound mechanic that effectively replaced the part breaking from previous titles (since you wont be breaking much other than the tail for some baffling reason) it gives the player full directional control of any attacks the player makes. As well as extending the range. Making it 100% optimal to stay in focus mode at all times. The directional changes are so extreme that you can spin 180 degrees around mid attack and still hit the monster. The slow paced precision combat of monster hunter that existed before is gone. The wound mechanic is the newest attempt to try and implement the clutch claw into the game. When you attack a monster enough times in an areas of their body a red glowing weak spot will appear and if in focus mode (which you will be) you can perform a scripted animation and (usually) knock down the monster. Every. Time. This turns most hunts against non tempered monsters into the equivalent of a school yard beating. The monsters in this game are completely powerless before the Hunter. They stand no chance. They go down fast and deal such low damage that it starts to feel like animal abuse. The difficulty doesn't start to get decent until you hit 8* tempered monsters in endgame. If you have even a passable amount of skill in action RPG's or Monster Hunter games you wont cart even once in the main story. Many will say the difficulty was "fixed" in the title updates but adding all the difficulty at the endgame does not fix how brain dead easy the main game is. It also now turns the game into a honey trap for new players as the difficulty curve is a sheer cliff to compensate for the difficulty complaints.

4.) Story:
Please stop. Please stop trying to make the Eco friendly angle work. It doesn't. The game's with the best stories were the ones focused on the communities of humans/wyverians/shakalakas/ect trying to survive on a planet inhabited by absurdly powerful dinosaurs, dragons, mega fauna, and whatever the hell Plesioth is. This new style they started with in World is just terrible. It places Humans at the top of the food chain while also trying to kinda sorta maybe be in danger but it just doesn't work. I just want to be some goober scrub hunter sent off to some back water village again.

5.) The environment and exploration:
They made a big point to advertise how this game is the biggest, most open, most seamless world they've made! Too bad its emptier than your average Ubisoft open world. Don't get me wrong: all the typical Monster Hunter gathering spot types are here. Too bad I have no reason to interact with them. Items are plentiful, Zenny flows like water, and your farms spit out more items than you can ever use. You'll only ever need to mine since its the only thing you can't do from the back of your sekret. There are no secrets to find, no rare materials to obtain, and no reason to stick around in the world at all. It feels like the environments are so large just to justify the existence of the sekret.

6.) The sekret:
Worse palamutes. Harder to control, more required for world exploration, don't do anything in combat, and include a tesla (tm) auto pilot feature just in case you felt that the best feature of a game was the ability to play itself. Bad design.

7.) Tacking:
Gone. You just know where the monster is know just like Rise. They just gave up. But not before straight up lying in interviews claiming that you'd "track the monster once". Its the story walk and talks. That is the "tracking" they meant. Just sad.

Ever since the release of World the devs have seem to have made the choice to appeal specifically to people who do not like Monster Hunter rather than those who do. They seem to believe that the changes to World that streamlined the game such as the always available item box at camp, the canteen at camp, the reduction in item crafting requirements, the wing-drake quick travel, ect. were critical to the success of World. Its just not true. World succeeded because it was still a Monster Hunter game. Wilds, as far as im concerned, is in the same boat as the Monster Hunter Movie. Monster Hunter in brand only.

I cannot recommend Wilds to anyone with any amount of love or respect for the previous titles in this series. It spits in the face of the people who liked Monster Hunter for what it was and strips out ANY need to try. Wilds is only interested in getting you back to slamming your face against a monster as quickly as possible. For some this Jangling keys level of entertainment will be sufficient. Sadly I loved the older games. When the series was "bad". Those games will never be made again. And Wilds just does not meet that demand.

better than world!