We were discussing this somewhat in the Monster Hunter discord, but I am confused about the trailer reveal having some focus on stealth. I get that the trailer shows a lot of the stealth to showcase how the mechanics work, but assuming the gameplay is pretty much the same as before what would be the point of the stealth then?
When the hunter was hiding in the tall bushes against those 3 small monsters all I could think of was "they are not a threat, why isn't the hunter just going after them or ignoring them all-together?"
Is it cause this is meant to represent early-game and the hunter has a low damage weapon? That wouldn't still be an issue since small-monster don't realyl do significant damage. Even if they did, would this be something akin to gathering, where it's only one early game, and then there isn't really a need for it to be geared?
Would they alert the bigger monster? That makes more sense, but then again, fighting
the big monster is the entire point, so I don't see the immediate negative here, unless the point is that they could attract multiple large monsters, but if the areas are still technically segmented with just more seamless transitions then its something that ultimately wouldn't it be too much an issue to deal with, unless that got changed to.
Is the stealth supposed to give you some down time? If doesn't make sense if areas are still fragmented (unless we are supposed to expect a large monster in every area) and if they are not, unless something changed with how potion and sharpening animations work, I don't see why one would need stealth to use those, there's most monsters easily give you plenty of free time to use those in the middle of combat, if you keep your distance from them.
The most it'd make sense to for the stealth would be that attacking a monster while not spotted would give a damage bonus, similar to how attacking sleeping monsters work. Either that, or the hunter is a lot more fragile overall and can't take hits, but I doubt that.