Monster Hunter Rise - Monster Hunter Has Changed Forever - Good Bad & Ugly - Title Update 1 Review - Iceborne Vs Sunbreak
No, he was actually quite good, but I have eight dragonators. I don't think it's a competition, and I know where they are all. Well, surely you should be comparing yourself to the admiral, not their commander. Well, I definitely couldn't beat him in a fight. Well, I hear he's a regime. Ladies, gentlemen, and monsters of all ages, whenever a new monster hunter game is released, there will always be groups of people who have issues with it, and more often than not, these are comparisons to the most recent monster hunter game.
When World and Iceborn were around, the complaints were that it wasn't like for you, and now that we are on the rise in Sun Break, similar complaints about how it isn't like World and Iceborn have taken hold, so today I wanted to have a discussion about one specific aspect of that, not only to make a point, but more importantly, to just try and quantify what we have in store for the future.
Specifically, its title updates So just this past week we got title update 1 for Sunbreak, and so I thought it would be interesting to compare this to the first title update released for Iceborn, as that game received a massive amount of praise for its post-game, content, and the way that it came out, to see if Sunbreak really does stack up and if that means that we can expect similar treatment in future title updates for this game as well.
So, to begin, what is the full list of things added to Sunbreak? With this update, we got seething basal geese, silver rathalos, lucent narghakuga. The entire anomaly investigation system, as well as the entire curious crafting system, were added to Iceborn, and in that first title update. Regen as a base monster was added, the lava section of the guiding lands was opened up, and the layered armor system was properly introduced.
How comparable Is all of this well Rajang isn't a new monster, but he wasn't in the world or iceborn before that point, so he was quite the addition to have a fan favorite monster with a lot of history. I would say his biggest comparison in the Sunbreaks update would be with Lucid Nagakuga. Of course, we have had regular nagakuga in the game already, but lucent is a pretty big departure from that and hasn't been seen in a monster hunter game in nine years, as well as being significantly changed for this game, as well as being definitely a fan favorite monster.
And that isn't even counting the addition of the other three monsters that we got in Sunbreak. Suffice it to say, as far as monsters go in the Sunbreak title update, we were absolutely spoiled. We deserve it now. Let's talk about systems. Iceborn as a base already had the guiding lands, which is a pretty significant endgame area, and it was expanded upon with the lava region in the update.
The region also gave hunters access to further upgrades to weapon augments, and so it's sort of hard to compare to any of these sunbreak editions. We got the forlorn arena, which is a new area but it isn't quite used as much for moment-to-moment hunting the way that the guiding lands was, but we also got the whole curious crafting system and the weapon augments directly compared to the wekman augment system of iceborn.
So you could argue that we got less on the map side but more on the augment side as this whole system wasn't in base Sunbreak, and then of course in Iceborn, the last thing that we got was layered armor, which we'd already had in Sunbreak, but what Sunbreak did get was the curious armor crafting system to add randomized skills to your armor pieces that can be re-rolled infinitely with materials that you get from quests.
This system is much more closely comparable to the safy jiva system in Iceborn, which didn't happen until the second update for that game, so we had more end-game systems added in this title update for Sunbreak than Iceborn did, but Iceborn also had more in-game systems as a part of the base expansion than Sunbreak did.
The final thing to compare here is the timing. Sunbreak was released on June 30th in the update released on August 10th. Just a little bit longer than a month later, Iceborn was released on September 5th, 2019. Yeah, I know, that long ago and the first update was released on October 10th, 2019. very close to the same distance there as well.
As a result, I think we can absolutely expect some breaks in the update cycle to very closely mirror that of Iceborn, if not even manage to jam in more monsters to each update as they have. Because an important thing to remember is that the thing that increases our play time the most is having new monsters to fight in the game called Monster Hunter, and that the Iceborn update only brought in regen, whereas this Sun Break update gave us four monsters not previously in the game.
Capcom has clearly caught onto a system they think works well as far as title updates go, and they are experimenting with adding in more and more endgame over time, ways to change the way that we make our builds and give us different objectives to spend our time on. I've seen people say things like, "Why wasn't this in the base expansion?" and the best answer that I can give you is that we would have gotten bored of it.
There is something very notable about how both games seem to have approached their title updates. The base expansion gives you a goal and an end game to start with. The first title update changes that goal a fair bit, and then with Iceborn, the second title update radically changes that goal, and so do further updates, the point being that they want you to focus all your hunting energy in one direction.
Then when the update comes, they'll point you elsewhere. They are keeping the hunting loop fresh by changing what your ideal hunting loop is. The game is being treated as a marathon. Rather than a sprint, are you sure you don't want to stick around? Well, there's something about this that just works.
Of course, people have always played monster hunter games for hundreds, if not thousands, of hours over their life cycle, but there was a big difference between hunting just for the sake of hunting and hunting because you know something big is coming; hunting out of excitement; for the future; hunting to prepare and make sure you are on your game for the next big thing; that your build is perfected as much as possible.
If the actual endgame itself changes a little bit with every update, it can show you different ways to play the game once you've reached the end as well. Maybe you don't like anomaly hunting all that much. Well, you still have four new monsters in this title update to hunt the hell out of in the meantime.
