Difficulty in MH is a very fragile balance

After the reviews came out today one point amongst them as I'm sure you've all heard by now is that the game is seemingly too easy & I'd like to discuss it a bit more.

Here are some specific comments that I want to highlight by IGN's - /u/Zylvin

I think that legacy skill is part of it but by no means the whole reason. I don't think a totally new player will steamroll as much, and I imagine they'll spend a lot more time pre-credits because they don't know that low rank armor isn't really worth grinding for or whatever. But even taking that all into account, I think this game is notably easier in very real ways - like I imagine someone who has experience with other action games or who beat Elden Ring will not find this game particularly challenging.

First off, why is the game being too easy a bad thing? Here comes the 'fragile balance' part of the title, for most players their bulk of playtime will be from repeatedly farming monsters to obtain goals set by themselves, nearly always being a goal to get stronger or customize a build to do a task more efficiently & if the game and it's monsters are too easy, many players will never feel the need to farm something more than once or try and optimize their build meaning that you'll absolutely tear through the game and be left with nothing to do & nothing to grind towards.

I can't dig into all the specifics of the endgame, but my criticisms are applicable to both the post-game after the credits roll and the endgame once I completed all the side quests and unlocked all the content I could. Endgame doesn't pull its punches quite as much, but I still found it quite easy all the way through to the last monster. I don't think I had actual trouble with a single monster, and didn't fail any quests, and I've fought every single one (and the hardest ones Tempered). I don't believe I've carted more than twice total and never failed a quest. Even in the context of the other base games, this felt easy.

This comment is when I first started feeling some worry, if the game as it stands never even pushes the player at all then the motivations to grind will be very low, if every hunt was killing the equivalent of 5 Jagras' would you feel the need to grind better gear? I personally would not.

Is it true that rare rewards are guaranteed drops in certain quests?, They can be, yes.

This here is the cherry on top to make the worry fully set in, it's just another addition that will reduce your already low motivations to repeatedly farm a monster, so not only do you not need to farm anything to get stronger, even if you do choose to do so, it's looking like that TOO will be easier and have less grind behind it which as a standalone feature is not inherently a bad thing but all of these things combined should absolutely give those looking for a challenge some worries.

I get the passion! It sucks hearing a thing you are hyped about might not live up to that in certain ways - though again, this game absolutely rules in a larger sense, and I still think folk should be excited!

To finish things off on a positive note, this collection of comments I focused on were specifically talking about the difficulty and how fragile the game becomes if it's tuned too far to one side, but this says nothing of the other areas in which the game is looking strong & well received, I really hope there is some significant tuning post launch to address the difficulty concerns so that we can focus on the other things that make MH great while grinding out our BIS :)