Monster Hunter is a social series designed to be played with friends. Monster Hunter: World is no exception, and even added new social elements in the form of post-hunt emblems highlighting what teammates contributed to the hunt—things like most monster parts broken, statuses applied, or slinger shots landed. One of the most coveted emblems is for most damage dealt, which I can only assume inspired modder muriEX to create this mod which not only tracks your overall damage, but also your DPS.
As muriEX explained on Nexus Mods, the DPS overlay mod "displays the damage breakdown and DPS of your current team." During a hunt, you can see how much damage you and your teammates are doing at any given moment. After a hunt, you can see how much damage you and your teammates dealt to the monster relative to its overall health, as well as your average DPS.
World's post-hunt damage emblem shows up very rarely, but many players would like to see their damage after every hunt. There's just something satisfying about knowing how much damage you dealt to a monster, kind of like a post-raid breakdown. MuriEX's mod not only meets that demand, it provides additional information which players could use to improve their play.
However, this mod is also in the gray area of what mods Capcom deems permissible. It's not like the cosmetic mods we've seen crop up, but it also doesn't provide any sort of power benefit. But because Capcom hasn't clarified its policy on mods for World, some players are nervous about modding their game at all. So, as always, mod with caution and at your own risk.
It's a little funny how much we've come to expect dance emotes in 2018. Obviously /dance doesn't top our lists of demands like 4K support or unlocked framerates, but it's honestly hard to imagine an MMO without a diligently programmed jig. It's a tradition at this point, and one that's expanded beyond massively multiplayer games to practically everything with avatars and a chat box. It's just part of the culture, at this point: if you see a Night Elf, you can bet they'll know the "Billie Jean" dance.
So we decided to tell a brief history of the dance emote in PC gaming, recorded through the power of 11 gifs. Considering that most of the world's teens communicate exclusively through Fortnite tangos in 2018, I imagine that we've only scratched the surface of video game dancing tech. But that just goes to show how deeply /dance has absorbed into gaming.
Everquest was ground zero for the modern MMO, and also the /dance /dance revolution. If Sony Online Entertainment wasn't the company responsible for first letting our avatars dance with each other, they're at least in the picture. Enjoy the above gif, of a squat Froglok raging against the primitive engine to get down. It's a far cry from the smooth pop, lock, and drops of the Fortnite generation, but we had to start somewhere.
Star Wars Galaxies will always be remembered as one of the great missed opportunities in the history of video games. But it did enable our Han Solo-surrogates to air guitar. That alone probably forgives for the whole NGE debacle, right?
This was my first experience with a /dance emote. Blizzard, in their constant efforts to make sure you never took the Warcraft universe too seriously, programmed unique dance animations for every race, and every gender, in Azeroth. More specifically, they made it so you could do the macarena if you were playing a female human mage. Shout out to the Night Elf lady samba, too. That thing alone probably earned the game its T rating.
You gotta hand it to Jagex. The British company was permanently hamstrung by an engine that needed to work in a browser window, and the programmers still managed to will a chintzy jig from the low-res knights and mages of Gielinor after a patch in 2004.
In 2007 I breathlessly installed my free trial of Lord of the Rings Online and emerged dewy-eyed into Middle-Earth to find some of the absolute worst dance emotes I've ever seen. I don't know if it was the engine, or the relative solemnity of the Tolkien fiction, but Turbine gave us a truly morose, joyless waltz. It actually kinda won me over; it's like they fed all the elves in Rivendell some ketamine-spiked lembas.
I get that this might be stretching the definition of a dance emote, but honestly, no documentation of the history of video game dancing would be complete without a mention of Commander Shepard's terrible, extremely self-conscious moves in the Milky Way's neon clubs. The animation became a meme almost instantly, and Bioware leaned all the way in to the joke in Mass Effect 3's epilogue DLC, where Shepard once again looks like a goober in front of all his friends.
League of Legends made the community-driven MOBA genre the biggest in the world. Where everyone was once trying to ape WoW and strike it big with an MMO, League kicked off the MOBA boom and inspired a wave of imitators. So it was only natural for it to keep the forms of expression MMOs had popularized and bake them into the MOBA, too. Every one of LoL's champions has a unique dance, and Riot eventually added an entire emote system with purchasable icons.
Of course Square Enix would load up its characters with more dance emotes than anyone could ever possibly need. To this day, I don't think an MMORPG has touched Final Fantasy 14 as far as modular dancefloor potential goes. And honestly, that's why we play these games in the first place.
Bungie got itself embroiled in a stupid controversy when it tried to sell emotes for real money, but thankfully, the catalogue of tangos the company put together was pretty solid. I can't hate a game that attempts to be so deathly serious, while also letting you drop your candy-colored robot-man to his knees for the "Hotline Bling" dance.
This might be the only game on this list that adds a few funny curveballs to the traditional MMO /dance formula. For instance, if you decide to indulge in some tipple during your journey through Elder Scrolls Online, your character will give you awesome, catatonic-white-guy-at-the-club moves when you instruct them to get down. They look so confident! Just like you do after enough vodka-cranberries at a wedding reception.
Perhaps the first time video game emotes have gone truly mainstream; Fortnite's ridiculous popularity means that the game's dances have been replicated on basketball courts, soccer pitches, and football fields constantly over the past six months. The dances themselves are adopted directly from the sort of Vine-ready memes that pass through YouTube (looking at you Backpack Kid), which has actually caused Chance The Rapper to petition Epic to offer some sort of financial kickpack to the choreographers who come up with the jigs themselves.
Monster Hunter made its long-awaited debut on PC this year with World, and quickly revealed itself as a franchise that's far goofier and more self-aware than its ornery reputation. I mean, just look at that player bust a move while hauling around one of those ridiculous, character model-dwarfing swords.
Modders have been hard at work customizing and fine-tuning Monster Hunter: World's PC port, but while modding in excessive patriotism or essential armor transmogs is tempting, many players have been reluctant to use any mods out of fear of being banned. The cosmetic mods we're seeing for World aren't like the paid Street Fighter mods that have drawn Capcom's ire in the past, but World is still a multiplayer game with a vague EULA, so it's unclear what mods Capcom considers harmless.
Concerned Reddit user Tenzi92 recently reached out to Capcom for clarification regarding two mods: one that replaces the Xbox button prompts with PS4 versions, and an armor transmog mod (presumably FineNerds' excellent mod). According to a screenshot posted by Tenzi92, a Capcom support representative said:
Capcom does not support any mods created by third parties, any official mod would be published on the Steam page of the game.
You can use any mods you like for the game, but it is at your own risk.
If the mod only improves the graphics of the game and gives you no game play advantage, normally you should not be banned.
It's an encouraging response, and I haven't heard of any players being banned for using mods so far, but the notion of "normally" not being banned is still shaky, so I reached out to Capcom for more information. Capcom did not comment on the above statement, but simply said:
Modded content is not officially supported by Capcom. We are unable to comment on the use of particular mods with the game, however our team does actively monitor content used in the game.
Right now, it doesn't seem like Capcom is doing anything to halt the use of cosmetic mods, but until it firmly states whether or not it will ban or otherwise punish players for using them, we can't be sure that every mod is safe to use at this time.