>>714067630
You do realize that a game can have QoL features while actually becoming more complex/difficult right?
The earliest monster hunter games are only hard for the first 30 minutes to 1 hour, then you realize that you can flowchart every monster to death because weapon movesets are so limited. Hammer is the perfect weapon to explain this
For example in basically every single game Hammer is one of the most braindead weapons in the game. You literally just spam super pound non-stop, because it's by far your safest, least committal move and is decently strong. You only ever commit to triple pound if you have a ginormous window (Like if the monster gets stunned). This is because the weapon lacks roll cancels or cancels into charge like in later gens, so you can't commit to anything if the monster is actually moving. Hammer is actually a pretty good weapon in a lot of the older games too, not the best but one of the stronger ones. It's boring as hell and dumb to fight anything.
Then in 4U they actually threw a bunch of cancels on the moves, gave it armor on side slap, made level 2 way better, etc. Now suddenly hammer is genuinely one of the more complex weapons to optimize because every single move, even the stupid spinning attack under certain circumstances, is useful.
So no, just because mining nodes don't let you gather from them because they're empty now, or because Rathalos decides to sleep in an unreachable area doesn't mean the game is "Dumber". If you want to argue that the older games are harder, fine, but those games are far more simple at their core.
If you want an actual example of "Dumbing down" then you can look at World Hammer, where they actually expanded the moveset, but the new moves (Big Bang/Ledge back hopping) are so fucking strong that your moveset is effectively reduced down to 1-3 moves again, AND you have simpler item management. Now that's actual dumbing down.
