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November 19, 2009 by The News Team
Filed Under: Wii
Are you looking forward to Monster Hunter 3? I know I am, but my delight will be a bit damped if the title ends up requiring a monthly fee. As of yesterday, Capcom said that they still don't have the final word on fees for the North American version, but they're hoping to do away with them. Also still up in the air is WiiSpeak support, which once again, the company has said that they're hoping to include.
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And that's all I have to say about that.
C'mon, capcom, you beat all the odds with Tatsunoko VS Capcom being released on the West. Whatcha got up your sleeve?
Plus this move will cost Capcom quite amount of sales if they charge us fees.
With a game like Monster Hunter, I'm sure Nintendo will do all they can to make sure this franchise is big in the US like it is in Japan.
I'm surprised Sony completely ignored the PSP versions. They are pretty much non-existent in the US.
I'm not sure if I would do it being a multiplatform owner, though a few bucks for a year's play doesn't seem as much.
Fees on the other hand... would surely pull me off.
What? You just said you'd stop buying games if No More Heroes sold well! Quit flip floppin'.
Nintendo ignores EVERYTHING.. They don't care that games are not selling, I am willing to bet. They will say ''Yeah we care'' but they NEVER show they do. Nothing ever sells on the wii. I wist I could talk with someone from Nintendo. because they are really ruining this Generation for me. Before I never felt like giving up on Nintendo but these days, I don't know what to think.
I said IF It sells well I am praying it doesn't
Monster Hunter in its current form will never be a hit here. It's not accessible, even for most core gamers. Everything about the game, from its inventory system to the actual combat, feels cumbersome. Until Capcom fixes the series' many problems they can continue to expect poor sales here, regardless of system.
@Mario1234567
Oh, are we back to whining about B rate games not selling like system sellers again? Haven't we already beaten that dead horse enough in the Marvelous feedback section.
So why is it so huge in Japan? Are the Japanese more forgiving with control issues?
anyway i really hope they release that sandlot game here . It's the same genre basically.
but pso wasn't very successful in the western world , the online fee didn't help
It would be different if you had a normal single-player and only had to pay extra for online.
From a Japanese gamer who posted on a website once, the whole social aspect of it is a major part. It's not uncommon for many Japanese gamers to get together in public and play. This is a major reason why handheld gaming is so dominate there, it's gaming on the go.
This is also another reason why I think the success Monster Hunter had on the PSP will never transit to home consoles.
Fro~
Edit: I still play games on Battle.net on a daily basis, and that is an EXCELLENT free service that sustains itself on small banner ads alone. (They aren't seen in gameplay at all, either.) I'm sure Capcom could come up with a similar design for the US market.
@rawkergirl
That isn't how it works. In the Japanese version, you pay in order to play online. Playing offline (either single-player or multiplayer) is just like any other game. It isn't an MMO or anything of the sort, just a co-op multiplayer mode. The only element resembling an MMO is the online town, which is basically serves as a lobby. Otherwise, it's pretty straightforward co-op.
They've never charged for online here (while they've always done so in Japan) so I hope they stick with that trend.
@Inneverate
Eh, well, the Wii controls do help make the game easier to get into. They're more complex than the average game, but not by too much. It's certainly an improvement over the PSP games and that awful "claw" method. The rest of the game hasn't changed much, but the controls have always been one of the biggest hurdles.
As far as online fee's...
It's not really a big deal when you look at World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Conan and Eve online all charge $15 or more in monthly fee's, in addition to the initial game purchase.
I am sure there will be some sort of fee for North America. If this game turns out to be very good, I'd possibly pay $5 to a month to play this game (if they include Wii Speak, otherwise no purchase for me). Maybe a bit more a month if they are going to support content updates, new quests, patches, etc to extend gameplay beyond the disc content. Yet, if they aren't going to support the community, screw it.
@necrolord
You can play offline, and it has a offline co-op mode (not the sp). If you want to play online, you have to pay fees in Japan.
This.
And I still shake my head at everyone who thinks that you have to pay to get a good online experience.
Mario Kart Wii is my favorite console online experience, save for Left 4 Dead w/headsets. And that one was pulled off for free.
If this has free online and it's as awesome as it looks, I'll put down money for it. If not, I'll rent it, play it for a while, and put it away.
I shouldn't be playing Mario Kart for free but paying for this.
I'd rather be paying a subscription fee and expect XBox service than pay for specific games.
But I'd rather not pay at all and have SOME games use online but use it well.
if they have wiispeak support, and technical support for that matter i will pay without a doubt... its a great game and you people cant be asking for a quality online service for free... its just dumb
The thing is people don't really enjoy paying for online, as much as they would enjoy paying for things that trick out their characters. Just go that route and make the paycards accessable via places like target, walmart and convenience stores like Nexon cards.
Valve, a tiny company with barely 130 people and that releases a single game most years, has a little program called Steam. It gives me a Xbox Live quality system with all the functions of Xbox Live that I can attach to ANY of my PC games. Yes, even the ones not created by Valve. All for absolutely nothing. I'm not even getting into the fact that they've provided free, substantial DLC to TF2 for the last year, and for L4D for the last year as well. Heck, they would've made the L4D DLC free to 360 owners as well if Microsoft hadn't required them to charge something for it.
And yet you're saying Capcom, which has at least ten times the employees that Valve has, earns more than ten times the amount of money Valve does, and releases many more games than Valve does can't provide a basic online that works consistantly without charging money? Bull.
It's sad that people think that a monthly fee is required for good online when a tiny company out of Bellevue, Washington has proved that this is completely false.
I wouldn't mind if they charged for some services though so long as said services only served to streamline the game or were purely cosmetic.
@dandancc
That's a relief, thanks.
Has Valve, this tiny company, made an RPG? Have they made anything as phenomenal as the Monster Hunter Franchise? No, all their games are the same Half-Life engine taken back to the sewing machine.
And I'm glad you meantioned Steam. Steam is their way of making recurring income to support their "free" online, off of advertisements-shoved-in-your-face revenue. It's a tiny amount of income, but it's enough for a tiny company. So even a tiny company of 130 people needs to make money off of their "free" service.
PSN.
@Q_Mulative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_wars
Also, 'worth' is subjective.
Lets look at it like this.
Xbox Live costs me $45 a year (actually, that much gets me 13 months, but whatever), and allows me an online service that, even with features like WiiSpeak, MH3 still probably won't be able to compete with.
MH3 at its cheapest is $80 USD in Japan. And that's without WiiSpeak, without the lore or the community that makes similar pricing structures like that which WoW boasts easier to handle, etc. Especially given that MH3 players aren't likely to see downloadable content or even patches of any sort (though I suppose the latter could be addressed through server patches).
It is not cumbersome, it is just different from the countless of other games that mostly play the same (hand holding lock-on, weapons that might as well be twigs considering their weight, lenient timing windows / concequences). The reason why Monster Hunter is unlikely to be big in the West is because the series is of its own nature.
It plays nothing like a WRPG / MMO / any sort of RPG, rather it is action game but then it plays nothing like Devil May Cry / Ninja Gaiden / God of War either. Put simply, the core of Monster Hunter is hard to relate to unless one is committed to spend a lot of time in understanding its many systems. It isn't an exxaggeration when I say it can take twenty hours just to get a grasp of the basics... and that isn't because it is cumbersome, but because there is that much there to its combat / monster system.
In Japan, the portability of the series helped it take off with huge success because Japan is a country where local co-op play is everything (and online gaming isn't). Add to that, the action genre scene has pretty much been in the sewers for the past couple of years, where even DMC is a shadow of its former self with regards to sales. It was just by pure chance that the different take on the action genre that Monster Hunter provides managed to appeal to the many Japanese consumers who have been left empty handed with the action genre.
That will be more difficult to achieve in the West when the action genre as it is (of the DMC variety) is still very much alive. So having another game come in and be completely different to what is considered 'standard' (not better, but standard)... when it comes to many a gamer, it is difficult to shake that percerption and make them want to look outside of their usuals.
You'd be a fool to call all of Valve's games copies of one another. Team Fortress 2 and Half life 2 are entirely different experiences. Do they share the same first person viewpoint? Yes. But they're far different games in terms of focus and gameplay.
And why not use the same engine? It still manages to look good 6 years after it was introduced, Valve constantly adds upgrades to keep it up to date, and it saves on development costs.
As for Steam's store paying for its excellent service, it still doesn't change the fact that Valve makes 10 times less money than Capcom does. Steam has over 20 million user accounts, yet Valve is still able to provide all these services for free. Capcom isn't even trying to provide Xbox Live quality, they're just providing something that works pretty well. I doubt Monster Hunter will gain the popularity it has in Japan here in the U.S. So it'll cost them less than in Japan to finance the cost of the servers.
The only thing that makes Team Fortress 2 different from a gameplay standpoint is the Engineer. they even removed the various grenades from Team Fortress Classic. Everything else is that standard issue handgun, shotgun, sniper rifle, melee, FPS fare. How can you not see that? I was done with Valve games the moment The Conduit released. It had 3 guns that were your familiar FPS crap, and 12 more which used sci-fi implementations such as lasers and electrical discharges. Is there a single Valve game that uses a laser rifle?
Nintendo is working with Capcom to bring this game here, so you're no prophet to be saying that it won't have the quality that the rival online attempts have reached for.
Capcom has a game franchise that mixes online RPG appeal with action combat and strategy. It's already sold better than rival console efforts in Japan and with both companies' marketing strategies added to the dedicated-though-relatively-small local fanbase, who would doubt that it would sell phenomenally here?
"Is there a single Valve game that uses a laser rifle?"
Uh, yeah. It's called, erm, Half Life 2. Pulse Cannon, anyone?
Half Life 2 also had Bugbait and the Gravity Gun (which, in case you didn't already know, is the indisputable greatest weapon of all time, heh heh).
The Conduit may have had pretty good weapon variety, but that didn't stop it from lacking something that most, if not all, of Valve's main games boast - a heavy layer of polish. Also, despite the weapon variety, the feeling I got every time I went back to play The Conduit could best be described the way you described what TF2 offered - 'familiar FPS crap'. Then again, the controls aren't as big a draw to me as they are to you, so I can understand the difference in opinion regarding the title.
As for the online, the fact that Ninty is working with Capcom is cool, but I've yet to see anything from Ninty that equals efforts on other consoles either - even the best of Ninty's online experiences (MKWii) doesn't match up (though it did get closer than I'd ever expected, and is a pretty good online service in its own right).
As for sales... The series' North American sales have never even begun to reach the Japanese sales. Not even once.
The pulse cannon is a reach, being mounted and with limited situational use. It just doesn't hold a candle to the Conduit Strike Rifle or the Carbonizer.
HL2 may have been a heavy layer of polish back when it was new, but years of sliding the same basic game engine in and out from underneath it has worn out the polish from the inside. Gravity Gun becomes portal gun, and is forgotten for every Valve game since. No other game uses anything significantly different from the typical bullet/rocket/flame projectiles we've all seen since World War 2 games became the face of quote-unquote-hardcore-gaming.
The reason is simple as to why sales haven't matched Japanese for Monster Hunter. There was only one PS2 game, which was barely even complete compared to other RPGs, let alone online ones, and the other games that released here were put onto a comparativwely stillborn handheld.
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