I am a long time monster hunter fan, its literally the only reason I owned handhelds in the last 20 years. I realize this is 210 pages late in some sense. I skipped MH:W because a buddy of mine who I enjoyed the series with the mostly said it was too easy, didn't keep his attention. Knowing the G-Rank release of all previous games, I just opted to wait.
So compared to the old games the things I like.
1) I don't need an external companion website to plan what to farm and build. What they've done in game is nice, I can check out everything with reasonable ease. Including the bestiary.
2) Its not handheld, its visually very appealing.
3) I have enjoyed the new moves for the single weapon I have played. I am a longsword player, I just like the relative speed and back in the day I wanted to cut off tails, this is where I started and I struggle to switch to anything else, the enjoyment isn't the same! I might try some new weapons eventually, I hope they are all interestingly new but similar for players of other weapons.
4) Its still pretty novel to see the monsters interact and figure out how to get into the fray and do some work.
Some things they changed that I understand why, but that definitely changed the way I played.
1) The punishment for carting has been massively lowered by being able to eat again on the quest. In previous titles an early cart was generally a fast abandon and restart. It definitely makes expeditions extendable in a nice way.
2) Being able to interact with the item box on the quest really eases up failing, I don't remember being able to ever access my entire stash like this.
3) The skill system is better and (deco's), but the consequence is that I have looked like a dumb idiot all the way instead of wearing a coherent visual set. Making a full set of anything was much less necessary because of partial skill points, and actually seemed very suboptimal to make full sets. I miss looking awesome by not having to wear more complete sets. This also had the consequence of feeling like I farmed parts far less. With decorations being end game, much like mentioned above I've looted almost nothing so far of note, which really pigeonholed me into wearing gear with decorations I wasn't allowed to find yet.
I didn't want to spoil the experience of the L-H-M chain so I purposefully didn't use the defender items, I mostly play this solo and am not driven to min/max to the endgame I had to wait more than a decade to get off handhelds. I did the quests to unlock the beginning of Iceborne, just the first two expediions. Then I went back and fought the two tempered bazel's as it was clear that upgrading my gear into Iceborne would trivialize some of the content from world. So instead of doing that I've opted to do some High Rank expeditions and find those missing *'s in high rank.
Its great fun monster killing again, I really do enjoy the game. It seems that it is far more accessible than is ever been, but it still has the majority of monster hunter under the hood. You can still get shoulder slammed, tail whipped and eaten stunned and slammed by Deviljho in short order even in high rank. I do think the ranged weapons must be substantially finer to aim especially on PC.
I've played entirely with the steam controller, and it seemlessly works with the haptic pad running like a mouse. So that's just a a nice compliment to the PC port.