Hoping maybe someone can shed light on the difficulty I'm having with this game. My roommate and I bought it a couple of weeks ago so we could play it together. The game does a crap job of explaining things adequately and the UI is a mess, but once I realized I kind of just have to look something up if I want to know about it, that stopped being an issue.
The recurring problem we're facing is that the game doesnt seem to give the player much in the way of feedback when it comes to combat. Every hunt starts to feel very similar, exhibiting the same problems. The monster attacks dont seem very well telegraphed. One second it's thrashing it's legs and you're fine standing right under it, and the next second it twitches its right leg and you go flying. A lot of the time the monster seems to attack nothing in particular and charge into a tree or rock that no one is even standing near. Generally I find that the monster's movements are so erratic that most of my time is spent attempting to close distance just to get an attack in. And then there's the problem that anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes into the encounter, the monster will seemingly get distracted and bolt in a random direction for no apparent reason, leaving a not insignificant portion of the fight spent just sprinting after the monster. Occasionally this means it runs into another (sometimes bigger, scarier) monster and if you're lucky they have a brief "turf war" which I've never seen last more than 1 scuffle, after which point they both attack you, forcing you to either fight 2 monsters at once until one of them runs off, or simply run and then track down your original target again.
At first I was intrigued by the lack of a healthbar because it forces you to pick up on other feedback, but once I realized that the monster basically only communicates when it is near death, it left me with no way of determining whether I was doing well or not.
Last night my roommate and I tried the Anjanath hunt many times and at no point did we feel like we were making progress or "getting the hang of it." Generally we'd do fine and then get chain stunned into a faint or get one shotted or something along those lines.
Am I missing something? This feels like a game that I really really want to like but man is it making it hard.