I got that that was what they were going for, still found all the older games clunky. Not yet played this but most that made the same charge and otherwise have similar tastes to me really like this one and state changes to that.
As I have said quite a few times in various places I wanted to like monster hunter and on paper it was almost everything I purport to enjoy in games (if you can make a case that I would not like crafting, exploration, thoughtful combat, giant monsters and co-op then I have no idea what posts of mine you have been reading). The resulting games though were far less than the sum of their parts and I really tried to get into them on multiple occasions in multiple ways.
No doubt there were some that went in thinking old school hack and slash* and dismissed it accordingly but it was certainly not all of them.
*though have you seen the trend in those games since about ninja gaiden on the original xbox or perhaps Devil May Cry? Timing, patience, planning/defence and anything but near infinite health with some button mashing is the order of the day in an awful lot of those games. Indeed nigh invincible demigod power fantasy might even the harder to come by side of that gameplay style these days if you chuck out the warriors conglomeration.
MHW makes absoluzely zero fundamental changes of any capacity, it's literally only a matter of distributing a home console game to home consoles which works best for the west. there is this insane misconception that NOW mh is finally noob friendly, all it has is a couple better menus. was clicking 5 more menus in a 300 hour game a deal breaker? i tune into streams and newcomers are 50hours in and still dont execute the correct basic combos, dont care to hit hitboxes, and just mash taking a lot of damage and time to complete quests. all things you could do in the previous games. all things that led the games to be called elitist or not noob friendly or whatever. there is still no autotarget, there is no canceling out of attacks, swing times and recovery are still the exact same. MHW is not a fundamentally different game because now you can get multiple subquests and dont have to buy anymore whetstones manually, the level of disconnect between public opinion and what actually changed in-game is pretty bizzarre to witness.
fact is, world has had a positive pr ball rolling and people attribute the success of a high-resolution, high-tech home version to the gameplay finally being less archaic. you can bring me a single person who has quit the serie because you couldn't walk while drinking a potion or because you had to buy a new whetstone stack every 5 hunts and that was a dealbreaker. All the complaints about people who didn't like the game are a combination of active hitboxes, slow wait&punish gameplay, and grinding. Oh, ironically enough, the story and cutscenes have been the thing that's been most criticized by the new audience saying they are irrelevant and a waste fo time. Just what any old MH player has always said that this game is not about story and will never have a relevant story to the people who never played the serie and demanded one for no reason. Capcom listened to an audience that never played the game and they criticized that they added the thing they thought the game needed without having previous knowledge of what actually works in that game. I have never read that someone has quit the game because the armor skill menu requires 3 button presses to get to. I have never read that someone quit the game because you have to throw a paintball to mark a monster. I did read a lot of rage negativity about the manual targeting, slow pacing, and grinding, which is still the core in World.
infact, world takes the crazy more hacknslashy stuff a tiny bit back from Generations and is much more similar to the first two titles in terms of more grounded/scaled down combat and more traditional-style monsters, which is ironic that everyone who has no idea about the serie is spouting the games are more hack and slash by hear-say.
Whatever hype misdirection happened to World, the casual hivemind has made it sell a lot so that's what matters, despite not a single one of the major complaints that have been made over the decade ever being addressed. It's Monster Hunter on high definition using all the buttons of a controller and it's easier to do coop on. That's literally it. If you actually tried the game before and didn't like the loop you will absolutely not like it now. The big positive buzz is coming from the home console audience who never actually gave it a shot and found out it's a good game, and just assumed it was radically different before because of all the rage memes going on.
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