Loot is the new level up. A few years ago, people posted about their fourth prestige on Facebook, most probably humming Call of Duty's butt-rock progression jingle as they did so. Come 2015, and my Twitter feed is cut with great swathes of pictures of Destiny's tooled-up future-warriors, owners boasting about their new exotic codpiece, screenshots saturated by more purple than a Prince album cover.
There's a case to be made that this is among gaming's most insidious trends. The line-graph of levelling up - fair pay for a good day's play - has been replaced with what amounts to gambling, your time used as the chips. Loot games are predicated on chance - the feeling of achievement at finding the perfect rocket launcher is far greater than a number going up by one, not least because, often, it'll be the only way you can meaningfully progress through the game. But there's the nagging possibility that it won't come for hours of practically unrewarded busywork.
Of course, if you're happy to put in the time, this is no real issue - particularly when it's put into a game that can feel as good simply to play as Destiny - but it opens some troubling doors for less scrupulous designers. Take Dragon Age: Inquisition's multiplayer. The majority of its characters are locked behind incredibly rare drops, but spend a little real money and you can buy loot booster packs. It's a mere probability increase, you're never promised a rare reward, and what was a time-bet suddenly becomes a higher-stakes affair.
All of which is to say that loot can be done so much better. Well, it has been done better, it's just that the west, players and developers alike, have yet to fully realise ('realise' in this case being used to mean 'creating a land-conquering commercial success').
Monster Hunter is a series that not only gets loot right, but makes its acquisition the beating heart of the entire game, and never more so than in its latest iteration. Like its predecessors, there are no levels in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, no steady climb in stats to go alongside your constant process of acquisition. Weapon and armour abilities are all you have to rely on as a player, meaning making newer, better items is your only means of progression. Alongside that comes the realisation that loot drops are as much a puzzle as they are a reward.
If your new bowgun needs spider mandibles to make, you head to the nearest mega-spider nest and smash its skittering resident in the face with a hammer until one of those mandibles can be more easily sawn off. It's that reactive loot, rewarding your thinking with the correct drops, that makes the feeling of achievement so much more tangible. This isn't to say there isn't an element of chance at work - plants, berries and ores are semi-randomised with every visit to an area, and the rarest items carved from monsters are either sparse or simply impossible to obtain without working out which piece of the beast to concentrate your attacks on.
The difference here is that you're not waiting for the electric bear-lizard you've been pummelling to fall over and spill a much-needed lance from its guts - barring some very rare examples, you'll be building every item you want from scratch, scrabbling together multiple elements to make the piece you want. Chance here is part of a wider scheme, not the be-all and end-all of success. It means that a full, five-piece armour set, particularly, is a document of the time you spent building it - and that time can be spent in so many different ways.
Monster Hunter 4 does a great job of introducing a narrative thrust to a series that's always struggled to tell a story, but its greatest work is in turning its gaudy, ludicrous costumes and weaponry into stories themselves. To nab an idea from Eurogamer's own Mr. Donlan, every item you earn involves a single ritual:
- Deciding what you want to build.
- Working out how to do so.
- Amassing and equipping the items you need to survive going out to do so.
- Collecting the myriad loot you need to do so.
- Doing so.
Often, you'll realise halfway through this process (hopefully at the third point, but usually at the fourth) that you simply can't handle your next target, at which point you start a new, nested ritual to build the armour or weapon you need to continue with the first.
Destiny and its ilk works off of the warm feeling of being done a favour - firing high-calibre rounds into a boss until the Great Algorithm In The Sky deigns you deserving of a new hat. Monster Hunter forces you to earn even the smallest upgrade, and the satisfaction is so much greater for the effort. You're not betting your time here, you're investing it.
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Personally, it sounds like it- whereas Destiny just appears to be a grind for the hell of it, a repetitious motion that you know amounts to nothing that you are still going through simply because the game holds your OCD to ransom, Monster Hunter balances the prospect of loot and drops with actually earning what you want- this is still a game in which you craft loot, but what you get is exactly what you deserve, nothing more, nothing less.
It really is an amazing game, and Capcom have finally realized the series' longstanding vision.
Have you picked it up yet? What do you think?
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