Don't change proton versions too many times or else denuvo will lock you out of playing the game you paid for, for 24 hours :)

Turns out the game is pretty fun when you don't have people constantly shoving down your throat that it’s the worst thing ever made

Having played Rise/Sunbreak, World/Iceborne, and Generations Ultimate, this game is a good blend of all of them. It mostly is a blend of Rise and World mechanic wise, with a sprinkle of Generations heritage. This game is fun, the monster fights feel more Rise coded while the weapon mechanics and player control is very World based. Every weapon feels good to play, even ones you are picking up for the first time. The story isn't anything special, but Monster Hunter isn't really known for it's stories. The graphics are stunning and monsters feel like they have actual weight and threat to them. I remember running into Rathalos for the first time in this game and going "[i]Oh my god, they actually made him feel scary[/i]". While I agree that the optimization isn't great and needs to be better, I don't agree with the review bombing. This team actually cares about this franchise and it's community, which is a lot more than other game companies at the moment. It might take a little time, but...

downside, this forced me to upgrade my near ten year old PC which I needed to do anyways. upside, it's fun and I will continue to have fun and can't wait for all the title updates and beyond for this game.

It hurts to write a bad review for my favourite franchise. The performance really is terrible don't let anyone tell you it isn't even on my PC setup 5090, Ryzen 9950x3D this games still stutters, crashes, unstable frame rates it is never consistent even if I set a limit. I was holding off writing a bad review as I had hope CAPCOM would fix the performance issues however 6 months in that's not the case and it has only gotten worse. This isn't acceptable at the price we paid and promises we were told by CAPCOM if I could refund the game I would. As a game developer looking at the engine this game is using, and lets just say the performance issues isn't going away which is why it hasn't been fixed yet because the engine is horrible and the developers can't say this or else they lose money so there's no point waiting for this game, it will always be in a bad state. Since the recent update my game has been crashing even more I can't finish 9 star hunts that take 25m. This is not promising ...

super fun to play with friends and great gameplay

So I guess they don't care about the other monsters in the game because buffing the same 8 monsters every update is just ridiculous. And their method of making the game more challenging is just increasing the health and damage you take is just lazy it doesn't make the fight harder it makes it mind numbing to where you don't want to play anymore.

The anticheat and poor optimization didn't actually prevent cheaters, it just prevented regular good people from playing the game. The game feels both weirdly short but also weirdly drawn out. The tempered RNG system is interesting on paper but obnoxious in practice. "The best" weapons require so much grind to get and then even further grind to look halfway decent. In positives they removed the gender lock on outfits so every monster now has "two" styles of armor available. The character creator and voice options are also pretty good. The handler isn't obnoxious and a fair bit of the characters are likeable. I really LOVE how beautiful the first few zones are, even though the later stuff blands out. This is a personal gripe but I miss the doggos and I don't really care too much for the birds but I won't count that against the game. Some of the characters aren't very good but they are outshined by the better characters so they don't really drag anything down. But unfortunately, i...

The technical performance of the game has been unacceptable since day 1, and it's still not improved half a year later.

Preface, I'm a huge Monster Hunter fan playing all the way from 2 through to this. But I cannot recommend this game at all... Not because of the content, because it is a buggy mess that should have been tested better before release. The game has been plagued with issues on my hardware. RTX 5090 / AMD 9950 X3D. Some updates leave the game playable but more often than not an Event ID 153 in nvlddmkm is thrown. Testing has ruled out a hardware fault. With extensive testing to rule out VRAM issues, CPU issues and even upgraded to a 2000W PSU to rule out power issues. There is no end in sight for these issues, if anything, the game has become more unplayable with every patch. For such an expensive game you'd expect better quality and support.