Monster Hunter Wilds' first Elder Dragon is finally landing in December along with some much-needed optimisation focused on reducing the game's ridiculous load on our poor CPUs

Capcom has revealed when we'll finally be able to take on our first Elder Dragon in Monster Hunter Wilds during this week's State of Play Japan, though I'm more interested in the mysterious performance improvements the developer is promising will arrive along with it.

Gogmazios was teased back during September's Tokyo Game Show, in what's set to be the monster's second ever outing in the series. We haven't seen Gogmazios since Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate all the way back in 2015, where he served as the ultimate final boss. It's been a long decade since then, but we'll be Gog gaming when Title Update 4 drops on December 16.

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There wasn't much else to say in the State of Play, unfortunately—bar "additions to the endgame" and "seasonal events" if you're particularly jazzed about more Festivals of Accord—but a follow-up post from the Monster Hunter account on X has me a little more excited. It promises "weapon buffs" along with "performance improvements and more!"

Anyone who's attempted to put their poor rig through a number of hours in Monster Hunter Wilds will know that the game kinda sucks on PC. I'm not running a souped-up rig by any stretch of the imagination, but Wilds battered my setup in a way no other game has quite managed to do in recent years. It was the game that pushed me to upgrade my CPU, and even then I'm still ploughing through the ranks with low settings for fear of my FPS tanking at crucial moments.

It's not the only complaint hunters have about the game, but it has been a major tarnish on its PC version—Steam overall reviews have been hanging around in Mixed almost since the very beginning, with recent reviews currently sitting at Mostly Negative. Performance and optimisation has played a huge role in that, and even eight months down the line Capcom still hasn't done enough to turn things around.

I'm certainly hoping that will change with Title Update 4. In a blog post back in August, director Yuya Tokuda said that the team would be focusing more on CPU optimisation in TU4, which is where a large number of the issues lie. "In regards to CPU load reduction, we plan to address this issue in the fourth title update scheduled for this winter," the post read. "Once the initial implementation is complete, we will proceed with a second stage of further mitigation issues."

While I am looking forward to bonking a giant tarry dragon on the head with my hunting horn, I'm even more eagerly anticipating whether I'll be able to do it with graphics better than "janky blurry stuttery mess" or whether I'll be continuing to hunt my way through crusty visuals and 30fps.