I miss old-school Monster Hunter

 I've been playing Monster Hunter since the release of Monster Hunter Tri on Wii back in 2009. Admittedly I wasn't there since the very beginning of the series but I still started playing in what you could effectively refer to as the "old" style of Monster Hunter. And honestly, while I appreciate what the newer games do, I wish they also still made games in this old style. 

Back in the day you had to do a lot more preparation and management for your hunts. You also had to figure a lot of stuff out on your own that the newer games basically give you for free.
In Monster Hunter Wilds not only does the game immediately give you the location of the monster, but you can straight up press a button and the game will autopilot you to it. I don't find that very fun. I much preferred it when I had to explore the map and figure out where the monsters were myself. And only when I found them I could mark them on the map. This makes me feel like I'm actually hunting a monster instead of just doing a simple combat mission.
On top of that in the old games you always had to make sure to not overflow your inventory. This meant that for each hunt you had to figure out exactly what items to bring for it while making sure that you leave enough room in your pouch to bring potential loot back to your base. Nowadays you can just bring whatever you want with you and anything you grab will automatically get transported to your storage. It really feels like they took a lot of the self-reliance out of Monster Hunter in the newer games when it comes to this kinda stuff. 

Don't get me wrong, I understand that these changes were all made to make these games more easily accessible for a wider audience. But I really wish that I at least had the options to play in the old style of Monster Hunter as well. Right now I've been finding myself playing Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate rather than Monster Hunter Wilds because MHGU still has the old school style of gameplay while being playable on a modern system. 
A lot of it will also admittedly come down to the fact that when I started playing these games, it was all in the style that I'm describing. So I suppose one is more likely to gravitate towards what they've known from back in the day. 

At the end of the day I think I will find myself regularly seeking out the older Monster Hunter games. Because in all honesty those games have the type of style that I gravitate towards the most. The longer hunts are a lot of fun, and I really enjoy all the micro management malarkey that you have to do in between each hunt.
As I mentioned before currently I'm gradually going through Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate. Mostly because that's the one game since Tri that I didn't play on release so it's still somewhat new to me. But down the line I can easily see myself doing a replay of Monster Hunter Tri, or maybe even finally trying out the Playstation Portable games. I'm having a lot of fun just chilling out and playing these older games. 

What's really telling is the fact that I stopped playing Wilds after about a month. If you look at my history with monster hunter games, I've clocked in at least 500 hours on every entry since Tri. Some of them even get close to 1000 hours totaled. However with Monster Hunter Wilds I got bored after about 100 hours.
Now don't get me wrong, 100 hours is still a lot and obviously I still really enjoyed the game otherwise I wouldn't have kept going for that long. But it is really telling that every game prior to this I could just keep playing over and over without ever getting tired of them. Yet with Monster Hunter Wilds, the game handholds me so much that I got bored very relatively quickly. 
I do hope that once the expansion comes out I'll find myself enjoying Wilds a bit more. I have to admit that that also happened with both Rise and World, so maybe it'll end up being great after all. For now I can't see myself playing much more of it anytime soon until the expansion is out. 

So long story short, I hope that one day they will release an old school Monster Hunter game again alongside the current mainline ones. I understand what the goals and purposes are of the changes they've made with the newer games but I really want to have the choice to play in the old style as well.
Maybe some day it will happen. I've seen a lot of speculation about them eventually releasing some kind of old school bundle. I can only hope that these speculations end up being true. 

With that I'm going to call it a post. I will probably boot up Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate again soon on my Switch 2. Now that's a game I never get bored of. 

Bring 'em to the pit!