Folk just want to kill troublesome monsters. Dragons. Dinosaurs. A horrific lava octopus. But in Monster Hunter Wilds, sating one's bloodlust, in many cases, means putting up with some severe performance issues.
Take a gander at the Steam page and you'll see that, despite Title Update 2's fixes, recent reviews sit at "Mostly Negative". And while criticisms are wide ranging, the biggest culprit continues to be performance.
"I love this game, but the Aug 13th update somehow made wound hit detection worse, added more input delay/lag, even worse performance," reads a review from one player with nearly 270 hours in the game.
In an update from game director Yuya Tokuda, published on Tuesday, the subject unsurprisingly rears its head again. While Tokuda does not directly address the criticism that Title Update 2 didn't do enough to fix the performance issues, or that it may have introduced more, he does explain what's been done and what's going to be done, while breaking down some of the challenges of making monster-hunting feel nice and smooth.
"In Title Update 2, we fixed bugs related to shader compilation and reduced the impact of anti-cheat measures on processing load by about 90%," he says. "In addition, as an option to reduce CPU load while improving frame rate, we implemented support for the latest super-resolution technologies, DLSS4 and FSR4."
CPU load is a serial culprit when it comes to Monster Hunter Wilds performance woes, and Tokuda goes on to tackle this issue in more depth.
"In general, increasing the native frame rate will also increase CPU usage," he says. "If the frame rate limit is set to unlimited or a high value in the options, CPU performance will be maximized in the attempt to increase the frame rate, which may result in a very high CPU usage. Please adjust your graphics options to limit the frame rate in accordance with your hardware's specifications."
Asking players to reduce their graphics settings is unlikely to go down well, especially as this has proved to be an inconsistent solution, and many players with rigs that should be able to easily handle the game have been suffering regardless. That said, there are still plans to keep improving performance.
"We are aware that some players may be concerned about the potential strain on their PCs, particularly those using CPUs known to have stability issues (as reported by various manufacturers), due to prolonged high CPU usage during extended play sessions," he says. "On the other hand, as making changes to CPU processing could affect the game's overall performance, we plan to proceed with caution."
CPU load reduction won't be tackled in Title Update 3 (though the next update will aim to improve texture loading for NPCs and mounts), so you'll need to wait for Title Update 4, expected this winter.
"Once the initial implementation is complete, we will proceed with a second stage of further mitigation measures," Tokuda says. "We will also address GPU load reduction in a similar manner."
It's a frustrating state of affairs, made worse by the fact that we just keep seeing this happen. Time and time again, expensive games made by some of the best teams in the industry keep releasing janky performance hogs that end up requiring countless patches, sometimes over the course of years. It's understandable that folk have just had enough.
This is compounded by the high cost of PC components, especially GPUs. When you're splashing out on a new rig that costs several thousand pounds, and then fire up a new game so you can enjoy all the fancy bells and whistles, of course you're going to be pissed off when it runs like crap.
I actually didn't see many of the performance issues that have impacted players in Monster Hunter Wilds, but it's the reason I gave up on playing Oblivion Remastered. The endless tinkering to get a stable, high frame rate is why I shelled out for an RTX 4090 (along with a new PC) a while back, but I've never actually been able to enjoy the peace of mind that you'd expect when you get a monster PC.
Anyway, talk is cheap. If Capcom wants to lose that "Mostly Negative" rating, it's going to need to make some significant improvements. And I'm just not sure people are going to wait around until the end of the year for that to happen.
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