Huge fan of the series and saw the single player theatre demo at E3. I came away feeling this is definitely a traditional Monster Hunter made "next-gen". Here are my notes:



+ Health and stamina bars not always visible

+ Use items at near full movement speed

+ Can lock on to monsters and quick turn camera like 3DS

+ Scout flies replace paintballs and show both trail and location

+ you activate scout flies by finding residue from a monster and taking samples, seems you can get enough to make it permanently on

+ Minimap can zoom to zone

+ Map still segregated into numbered zones, more interconnected, and no loading between them. But moving between zones is generally via narrow corridors

+ Slingshot used a lot for luring monsters

+ Traps and flash bombs built into environment, maybe still consumables available?

+ Some kind of paralysis inducing consumable knife

+ Monsters have a lot of cool animations for fighting each other, picking each other up

+ Mounting works like 4U, but you can move between mount spots. Also some way of eventually doing an attack

+ Great Sword moveset looks the same, but the effects for charge were much less intense audiovisually

+ Cutting tail looks hilariously exactly the same

+ Can use hookshot thing to repel down surfaces

+ Two new large monsters - the TRex and the frog thing

+ frog thing regurgitated some food it ate for little monsters to enjoy

+ had some way of summoning the flying monster to take you to base camp at seemingly any time

+ change weapons and armour at base camp

+ had a Palico buddy complete with its own weapon armour

+ HBG looked like it could always move slowly while shooting

+ HBG machine gun thing seemed like a special mode, depleted a meter

+ HBG had many ammo types and traditional ammo switching mechanics

+ sharpness meter was visible but never sharpened

+ gathering plants was instant with no animation

+ carving was slow

+ the demo had really aggressive tutorializing with the quest giver talking to you throughout and her head popping up on the right of the screen