Slave to the Grind

 

            Hello again! I’ve been playing a little of Space Marine 2 again and it’s fun but kind of repetitive. Capcom had a Monster Hunter showcase recently so there’s some things to talk about there. I don’t know how to do openings anymore… go to the next paragraph.

            I think I’m seeing Space Marine 2 and Monster Hunter to be similar. They give a lot of busy work to do. In Sunbreak we have the qurious and anomaly grind, in Wilds we have the artian weapon grind and in Space Marine 2 we’ve got prestige and lots of weapons to level up. I just find this busy work to be lazy typically. In Helldivers 2 I can play on the hardest difficulty with my friends wearing pretty much whatever armor I want with whatever weapons and stratagems. Sometimes, with certain major orders, we would be better off wearing certain armor or using certain stratagems but overall it’s usually fine. Some missions just aren’t for me or I haven’t figured out how to do it yet, like the rapid acquisition missions, those missions can eat shit. It was while playing that mission that I was like “I don’t want to do this anymore, I want to go in Space Marine 2 and be a walking tank.” I have no idea how you’re supposed to get through that mission on Helldive 10, but I don’t HAVE to play that mission, there’s no benefit for me, no gear locked behind it, it’s just there. Overall I could probably play Helldivers 2 forever, do the same old missions over and over and use the same old weapons over and over but there’s just something about it that makes it okay to do that. There are times when I do get sick of picking the same stratagems again and again and then I try something else and remember why I don’t do that or I’ll see someone on Reddit or YouTube talk about a gun I’ve never even looked at and try it and come out with a new primary for a specific faction. The grind of Monster Hunter is what leads me to stop playing. I feel like I play and play and play but I’m not seeing the return. It’s especially bad in MonHun because it’s all random stats. I don’t know for certain with the artian weapons, I know there is some RNG to it but the quriou crafting can be ridiculous. Neither one of those things is necessary for endgame stuff, it could make things easier if you get the right skills but it’s just unnecessarily time consuming. It’s kind of like in WoW, this gem is purple but in all honesty it only gives you like 1% more of something then the green one so is it truly worth it? My biggest problem with Sunbreak is the master rank grind. Again, I’m just doing lots of hunts and it seems like it’s going to take a long time to get to my next quest. I’m at 150 right now and know to get the last monster I have to get to 180, that’s rough. I don’t know, it’s like you have to play these kinds of games ALL the time to keep up with it or you fall behind and, for me, I loose interest when that happens. Maybe if you only play one type of these games it’s fine but when I play multiple it can be very stressful. Maybe I should just not get a Monster Hunter game when it first comes out, get it when all the updates are released and then get it and play straight through. I don’t think I have that kind of will power.

The games are fun but they get repetitive. I like Space Marine 2 a lot, I like the combat, I find it to be a lot of fun but the gameplay loop can get boring. For PvE, we have operation missions that are a parallel to the Titus campaign so it gets a little boring doing the same missions over and over. The siege mode is fun too but again, you go through the same zones over and over so you get used to it and it can get predictable/repetitive. Stratagems are operation missions with a twist. I know they’re working on Space Marine 3 already but I kind of wish they would just make a co-op PvE Space Marine game where they just add different units and more races to fight over time. Like if they just stayed with Space Marine 2 but added in Orks or Eldar or Tau or the weird Mad Max humans that were in the Amazon short to the siege that would be okay with me. I still think games like this that try to do everything should just split them up between separate games and work on it that way. You can have your story based games over there with multiple releases, but maybe the multiplayer and co-op could be their own things that you can patch and build off of them separately without adding a whole new game and starting over. It’s like my post about Ghost Recon’s multiplayer, if they just had a multiplayer version that they could have for years and years then they wouldn’t have to keep making new multiplayer aspects for their story based games. They could probably make more story focused games if they didn’t think they had to have a multiplayer added in every time. The problem with 40k, I think, is the developers, or maybe the overarching hold 40k has is the things, NEED to have some tie to the lore. I think maybe the last thing that was free of that was Last Stand in Dawn of War 2. They won’t add another faction to fight in Space Marine 2 because the story only has the Tyrandis and the Chaos. Another game I’d really like to see is Chaos Space Marine. THAT would be fun. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, we play and see so much of the Space Marines that I’d like to see someone else once in a while. It’d be cool to be a Chaos Marine and see who they fight against on the regular besides just the Space Marines.

Monster Hunter Wilds had its fourth/last title update the other day that introduced Gogmazios, big oily dragon. I haven’t played the game since the Lagi update and I was fighting with the controls more than the monster (they changed the way insect glaive behaves apparently) but even so it took me only two attempts to beat him. Granted it was the forced story mission, maybe it’s easier than a regular quest? But even so, should it have taken only two tries? The first time I died like three or four times during the first phase so I knew I wasn’t going to finish it with the knowledge from Reddit of what happens in the third phase. I will say though I do appreciate these Reddit posts that give tips about the fight, takes out some guess work. I am not a fan of trial and error right now, I don’t have time for that shit. So after I lost the first time I went to the smithy and upgraded my armor, most of it was at level 10/16, but with that upgrade and having seen most of the mechanics in the first run, the second run was pretty much no problem. I only carted twice and both were during the third phase when my bird raptor was being uncooperative so I couldn’t get to Fabius in time. So that being said the fight itself is cool I think but it just seemed short. I’m usually complaining that I find hunts take too long but I feel like these kinds of monsters should really be a spectacle, it should not be quick. I feel like it should take so long that maybe the monster doesn’t have any armor or weapons to craft once you defeat it. I know that would not fly for most people, for most people that is the whole point; defeat the monster, get the gear but when it’s the last monster and you defeat it without its gear then what does it matter? So I think that the fight should be so time consuming and intricate that it would make people NOT want to farm it. Maybe it’s a really cool fight and you’d like to relive it from time to time but not be something you do for a whole afternoon, just queue for Gog after Gog after Gog. So either that or because the fight is so long you get a boatload of rewards in the box after completing it so in theory you’d only have to run it a couple times to get most of what you need. I did like that you kind of needed two different elemental weapons for the fight, or at the very least have a dragon weapon for the third phase, it made that whole gimmick actually be meaningful. I’d be okay with that feature staying in future games or maybe it would be only for certain fights like this one because I really did not use it during the rest of the game.

One thing I was remembering about MH3U was that I typically always ran armor that was strong against whatever I was fighting, I wasn’t much worried about the skills the armors had, just if it had good elemental resistance and it looked cool. I obviously didn’t really know much about the skills then, it being my first MonHun game and all. For the last few games I’ve been more focused on the skills/weapon combination. For most games I usually go with the motto best offense is a good defense. I’m not too interested in winning as fast as I can, the longer I can stay alive the more likely I will win. So maybe with the next Monster Hunter game I will try to go back to basics and try that school of thought. I’ll forget as soon as I post this, maybe I’ll remember?

Alright so what do you think? What have you been playing recently? What’s your favorite class in Space Marine 2? Would you like to see a more co-op, PvE focused Space Marine game? I’m still hoping they have a last stand mode in Dawn of War 4. What about Gogmazios? How are you doing with that fight? Do you think these elder dragon fights should be longer? Leave my some comments and I’ll get back to you when I can, bye-bye!

@AztecSauce