With some of the recent news of games being “too easy,” I’m recognizing a pretty negative sentiment that does nothing but reduce the accessibility of gaming.
I think it’s pretty clear from other articles I write that I care a lot about what accessibility in gaming means, and I want to illustrate it with a recent development going on that concerns Monster Hunter Wilds. The critically acclaimed action rpg has been often criticized for being “too easy” by followers of the franchise, citing simplified mechanics and shorter hunts due to the new “wounds” system. I believe this very common complaint has been recently snuffed out with the newest Title Update introducing some powerful fights to the game, but the sentiment remains—the game is “too easy.”
I went looking for more discussion around this, especially considering the cult following that Monster Hunter has with die-hard fans who sink hours and hours into the game. I’ve seen mention of friends who’ve seen their buddies with no prior experience clearing endgame hunts with little preparation and a lot of citations from veterans who call this the easiest game in the franchise, which is always a pretty scathing review. I will note that a lot of the more negative opinions regarding this come from long term fans of the franchise while those with less experience mention that, even while easy, the game is fun and satisfying. So, what’s the reality?
Let me start by mentioning this: My first Monster Hunter game was World, released in 2018 that I played on and off till I reached a 30 hour playtime. I played Rise a couple times with friends, achieving similar playtime until Wilds was released. There, with my very experienced friends and some time to kill, I completed the game’s Eastward Wings achievement (the 100%) as well as sunk a solid 100 hours into the game within the first month. I have no doubt that I’m still a casual player in the eyes of some, but I’d like to think my experience holds some weight within the conversation of difficulty. With that said, I can say this:
At hunter rank 160 I carted to a non-tempered Blangonga.
The conversation that a game is “too easy” always confuses me because there has never been a game in my life that was so easy that it was a problem. Even as I begin to optimize my gameplay and find myself at a point that a game is becoming easier after my skill is improving, the reason the game is not “too easy” is because the actual difficulty of the game is never changing. This is what I believe is the disconnect—as players get better at games and achieve this coveted “gamer” position in which they have an intrinsic talent for specific genres, they begin to conflate their improving skill with that of the game’s difficulty. Games aren’t getting “easier” with their newest installments—you’re just better at them. It’s up to a player to understand that they’re getting better and if they want to do anything about it.
Allow me to explain: when I carted to the non-tempered Blangonga, I was playing on stream with a group of friends who were new to high rank. As such, I tossed away my armor and put on a set of rarity 6 gear in order to avoid ruining the fun by killing the monster too quickly. This lack of defense and a less optimal build, in combination with my hubris, caused me to forget to heal and take a fatal gorilla strike to the face. It was embarrassing and silly–-but it was fun. If I had simply kept a set of guardian arkveld armor and a +5 artian weapon on while running around with these players, I would have surely kept my health up and never had to deal with the shame of riding back to the fight as the others continued to wail on the weakened monster. My choice to reduce my gear’s power was a very particular one—in order to make the game harder, I made choices to hinder myself and bring a bit more challenge to my fights.
This level of difficulty selection in games is something that exists everywhere, and the beauty of playing this way is having more control over what challenges you face. Some players I know in Monster Hunter avoid optimizing weapons or armor for the sake of finding a good looking set of gear to show off in pictures, ignoring skills to instead focus on being pretty. This is—however unintentional—a form of difficulty selection. Avoiding game mechanics is a great way to change your experience, something that extends from never using a class in an mmo that you think would make things easy to never leveling up in an rpg. It’s a form of difficulty selection players do for particular challenge runs that doesn’t have to function as “impressive” to be a worthwhile endeavor—if you want to play Monster Hunter Wilds without ever eating food, there’s no youtube audience you have to please in order to get the ok to do so.
If one doesn’t want to hinder themselves from using game mechanics, challenging oneself to find faster or more efficient methods of completing tasks is still a form of difficulty selection. Watching people meticulously build a damage dealing machine in Monster Hunter to take down hunts in under a minute or seeing a solo insect glaive player take down a tempered arkveld without a scratch on them are both feats of skill that any person can partake in attempting. The decisions people are able to make to create fun challenges are endless—for example, consider the millions of ways that people have beaten games by FromSoftware such as on guitar hero controllers or even back to back without taking hits. If a game is “too easy,” the words shouldn’t be used to complain. They should be an inspiration to boot up and find new ways to challenge yourself.
And I note these things because the solution cannot just be to make games harder. For a lot of people (myself included when I started in Monster Hunter Wilds), the lower ranks are still a pretty hard journey. I had a triple-cart on the first Rey Dau after having to learn that my ability to dodge a railgun isn’t what it used to be, and my armor had to be tweaked once coming in contact with the guardian monsters during the final act of the main story. To call this game “too easy” is to dismiss the failures of people to reasonably tuned experiences and simply avoid discussing that a reasonable discrepancy of skill can exist between new players and veterans. Monster Hunter Wilds is tuned for a middle ground of helping new players enjoy the experience as well as giving resistance to people who are still finding their footing. If it were tuned solely for the diehard fanbase, there’d be a large portion of players who couldn’t make it past the early ranks. This concept links to accessibility, including features that are introduced to allow for players to enjoy the games in the way they wish to. The seikret’s auto riding (something mentioned as a feature that simplified the game by removing the issue of monster tracking) is a toggle that can be actively turned off with the up button on the D-pad. For anyone who doesn’t want to use it or believe it makes the game “too easy,” they always had the option to track the monster the old fashioned way. In the words of the Doom twitter account, “You control the buttons you press.” Adding other accessibility features such as visual indicators for noise or auto-clicking for holding buttons can be helpful for those who require it and actively ignored for people who might think it removes the challenge of the games.
The solution to Monster Hunter Wilds’s difficulty problem isn’t with the need for Elder Dragons or a 9-star tempered monster, but in players needing to understand how they want to interact with their games. Honing skills and getting better is an intrinsic part of any talent. In those talents, it’s up to the person whether or not they want to improve their ability for the purpose of getting faster or if they want to challenge themselves with harder tasks or impediments. Gaming is the same—you can continue to practice your aim or improve execution with the intent of being better, but to bring the challenge back from your earlier days of picking up a controller is going to require being creative.
So get out there and beat that Zoh Shia with a full team of rarity 1 greatswords. Show ‘em who’s boss.