ranzware
As I write this on Friday, more than 1.3 million people are actively playing Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam. So far only around 13,000—or 1%—have stopped playing long enough to review it, but those who have are largely frustrated. Steam reviews sit at a disappointed “mixed,” largely citing performance issues as the reason.
And I get it. Even though I’ve had a blast playing Monster Hunter Wilds for the last two weeks on a pre-launch build, I’ve had to look past some bizarrely low-res textures and frequent framerate dips to enjoy my hunting time.
After Capcom’s big talk about weather systems and a dynamic, changing world, I kept waiting for something in Wilds to truly wow me; for its ambitions to dramatically and meaningfully change the experience in some fundamental way. Because if Monster Hunter Wilds did manage that feat, I’d be willing to overlook the pop-in, the weird half-transparent vignetting on geometry, and the lackluster framerate even in fairly sparse environments. But that hasn’t happened. So as much fun as the hunting may be, I’m left wondering why this game runs so dang badly.
In 2017, I played Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on a Wii U at a comically low 1152×648 resolution (on my 4K TV!) and it barely managed to run at 30 fps at the best of times. I didn’t care one bit. I was entranced. I played it for hours a day after work for a straight month. The world was packed with so much to discover and used physics and sound simulation and wind and weather in meaningful, open-ended ways that encouraged me to experiment and discover things for myself. Its ambitions far exceeded both my expectations and the reasonable limits of its hardware.
So, yeah, I was pretty psyched when I could play an emulated version of Breath of the Wild at 4K, 60 fps on PC a year later, but nothing could’ve stopped me from loving that game even when it was being held together by the combined spit and chewing gum of 300 Nintendo developers doing something they’d never attempted before.
If Monster Hunter Wilds made the same sort of leap over anything Capcom had ever attempted before, I’d forgive it practically anything—even its graphics permanently looking like those glitched beta abominations. But Wilds isn’t making that kind of moonshot, and without it I’m left with the frustrating sense that we’ve been in this exact mess before.
Monster Hunter: World caught flak for issues with its PC version struggling to hit 60 fps even on top-end hardware, and it was released some six months after the console version. Capcom worked on patches for it for months until it was up to par. But in 2018 it at least looked closer to what you’d expect a big budget, demanding game to call for than Wilds does in 2025. Base appearances only matter for so much though, right? Breath of the Wild’s relatively simple graphics wouldn’t have justified it creaking along at 23 frames per second in the heat of the action, but everything going on under the hood did. If only Capcom had a really ambitious but poorly performing open world game to compare to…
Oh, right: Dragon’s Dogma 2.
This time a year ago Capcom released Dragon’s Dogma 2, an open world RPG built on the same RE Engine powering Monster Hunter Wilds (or at least a version of it; beneath the name, I’m sure there are substantial differences between them). And what happened? When it reached 13,000 user reviews, the score was Mostly Negative. That time the top complaint was microtransactions (something that comes up in Wilds reviews, too), but performance was right up there.
Capcom had an explanation: “A large amount of CPU usage is allocated to each character and dynamically calculates the impact of their physical presence in various environments. In certain situations where numerous characters appear simultaneously, the CPU usage can be very high and may affect the frame rate,” the developer said at the time. It took a patch in June, and then another in September, for the CPU load to be meaningfully reduced.
Players were right to criticize Dragon’s Dogma 2’s performance when there was clearly optimization work to be done. But as PC Gamer’s Fraser Brown wrote at the time, it was a shame to see its launch colored by those issues, because both “Dragon’s Dogma 2 and its players deserve better.”
“I confess I don’t get too bent out of shape about frame rate dips, or even the odd stutter, if the rest of the game is good enough,” Fraser wrote last March. “One of my all-time faves, Dishonored 2, had a host of performance issues at launch, and it didn’t stop me from becoming absolutely besotted with it. Games are more than their frame rates. But it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a £50 game from a major studio to run smoothly on modern hardware. These issues did not suddenly crop up on launch day, or when review code went out. Capcom knew what state the game was in.
“The whole situation kinda sucks, because few of the criticisms are actually about the game itself. The conversation surrounding it should be focused on tossing goblins, climbing on dragons and the absurdly good combat. But that’s all been entirely overshadowed by optional purchases and frame rates. And that’s all on Capcom.”
Here we are again a year later with the exact same complaints, about a game that actually seems less ambitious. Monster Hunter Wilds is doing a lot of things the series hasn’t done before: Simulating night and day, making its big environments seamlessly roamable without frequent loading screens, completely remaking the surroundings when the season shifts from fallow to plentiful. But from what I’ve played, those things aren’t fundamentally changing what we spend most of our time doing, which is hitting big monsters with big weapons. That part of the game is great, maybe the best it’s ever been.
Yet Wilds undercuts its new environments by giving you a mount that just autopilots you from one place to another. And its ecosystem is little more than window dressing: we’re not suddenly seeing shocking emergent behavior from monsters or having to interact with nature in new ways to hunt them down.
I expect to keep finding little ways Monster Hunter Wilds is impressive as I play more, and there are moments where it’s genuinely a beautiful game—I love how lush its environments can be in the season of plenty, and some of its cutscenes that play with lighting are genuine jaw-droppers. I love the art style in general when it’s not hampered by textures dropping to 2007 resolutions a few feet away from the camera.
But I don’t see it replicating the way Dragon’s Dogma 2 had ideas and ambitions that made the performance issues more forgivable. As PC Gamer’s Lincoln Carpenter wrote about it in our Game of the Year awards, it’s “dense with charming design idiosyncrasies” that gave its open world (and those CPU-draining NPCs!) a flavor unlike other RPGs. It came closer to that Breath of the Wild threshold where ambition outweighs practical quibbles.
And that was the long-gestating sequel to a cult game that famously didn’t sell that well more than a decade ago. Wilds is the sequel to Capcom’s bestselling game of all time.
Monster hunters are used to fighting increasingly challenging versions of the same monsters in these games over and over again, but the expectation is that remembering their tells and dodging their attacks will become second nature as we learn from our mistakes. Developing games is certainly a hell of a lot harder than playing them, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating to watch another Capcom launch walk right into the exact same haymaker.
Source link
Kurt Indovina
Add comment