Monster Hunter Wilds is in a weird spot—it's being buried under an avalanche of negative Steam ratings and community sentiment. At the time of writing, its recent reviews are "overwhelmingly negative", with just 12% of over 20,000 user reviews being positive.
Capcom's fighting a war on two fronts—firstly, the performance for the PC version has been not-so-great. Secondly, players have been complaining about a lack of proper endgame content and challenge, with a lot of the usual Monster Hunter-y mechanics ironed out in favour of streamlining routines and removing friction.
The latter is getting sorted, slowly, but surely, with title updates and arch-tempered monsters—but building out the kind of solid, repeatable endgame that fuels a Monster Hunter game takes time, especially if the scaffolding wasn't there on launch. And given those Steam reviews? Performance still isn't completely fixed, either.
In fact, community response has been so turbulent that questions about it even bubbled to the top of a recent shareholder meeting. The meeting was held June 20 last month, with summaries published today. In the shareholder Q&A, Capcom was asked twice about player reception to Monster Hunter Wilds.
One shareholder stated "There have been concerns raised regarding recent titles, including insufficient content volume and optimization issues. What are the Company’s plans for addressing these matters going forward?" Meanwhile, another asked: "Are the development staff aware of the feedback being shared on social media and message boards regarding Monster Hunter Wilds?"
Capcom's answers to both were fairly dry and boilerplate. In both cases, Capcom reassured shareholders that "the development team carefully reviews all feedback received from our users" and that it'll be "committed to enhancing user satisfaction" via future updates.
However, it's a pretty good Geiger counter for, well, danger. Monster Hunter Wilds still sold like hotcakes (of course it did, it's a Monster Hunter game), but when shareholders are asking about the dunks you're getting on social media, it's a pretty good sign you've got some problems to fix.
If we look at the SteamDB charts—not the be-all end-all, as this series is popular on consoles—Wilds has enjoyed a significant windfall of players from its recent title update. However, for a short while, it was getting beaten out for concurrents by Monster Hunter World, with 24-hour peaks dipping below 20,000. That's below World's consistent playerbase, for those keeping score.
As a series newcomer, I've got no context to compare Monster Hunter Wilds to; but there's a reason I played a bit of Title Update 1 and then promptly moved on. I wouldn't say any game I spent 80 full hours on wasn't worth full price, but the post-game hook didn't sink its jaws into me as much as I'd expected, given the series' reputation.
The grinds I was facing weren't challenging enough to feel like anything other than busywork—and I'm already subscribed to two MMOs, so you can only imagine how little time I have for that. It's basically my entire schedule. Alas, I drifted.
Time will tell if Capcom can put its money where its mouth is. That it's struggled so hard with PC performance is a real problem, especially since around 60% of its sales last year were on PC. If it wants to keep seeing those numbers, it'll need to put together some better ports—as the saying goes, hell hath no fury like a PC gamer with throttled hardware.
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