Highlights
- Monster Hunter Wilds smashes records with 1.38 million concurrent players, surpassing all previous entries.
- Steam user ratings fall due to severe PC performance issues and optimization concerns.
- Capcom’s reputation is at stake as players criticize low challenge levels and paywalled content.
Monster Hunter Wilds, another instalment in Capcom’s venerable monster hunting series, began with an “amazing start” regarding player count and sales, thus establishing an unprecedented commercial apex for the company. The game has completely left in the dust concurrency peak levels set by its extremely popular predecessors, Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise, which recorded highs of 334,000 and 231,000 concurrent users, respectively.
Wilds recently shot up to 1.38 million concurrent users, more than one million above Monster Hunter World’s. This puts Wilds in the Top 5 all-time highest concurrent player counts on Steam, ahead of titles such as Lost Ark.
Rising User Discontent on Steam
Capcom released the game simultaneously on all platforms in an accomplished strategic move, contributing to breaking records for player numbers and sales. Consequently, Monster Hunter World sold 40% more than Monster Hunter World in the USA in its launch month alone. However, the towering commercial success stands tall with a shadow cast upon it by a starkly contrasting user reception on Steam, one that can hardly be termed optimal.
The game, Monster Hunter Wilds, is rated an overall “Mixed” (61% positive) with over 136,000 total reviews. However, the Recent Reviews tab in a recent look does not paint a happy picture. It says “Mostly Negative.” This recent sentiment is based on over 6,000 reviews in the last 30 days, with a whopping 75% of them giving Capcom’s leather-gathering sim a thumbs down. This is a sharp decline compared to Monster Hunter World’s 89% average score and Monster Hunter Rise’s 82%.
“Capcom released another unfinished mess of a game, this time above MSRP, and withheld finished content to pad their release schedule.”
– Steam Review
Capcom’s Reputation at Stake
A major contributor to the falling user score has been the “persistently wonky performance” of the PC version. Performance seems “really all over the place,” as it struggles to hold a “stable, consistent framerate” even on “top-of-the-line” machines. Many say that only with Frame Generation can one attain an adequate level of smoothness, but the gameplay also turns out to be “very choppy.”
According to some players, “recent updates have increased performance issues” and “made things worse.” One of those players even described a drop in frame rates from 60 to 15 FPS: “Basically, it’s a slide show.” The RE Engine is also under scrutiny, with some saying that it “may not have all it takes to handle open-world experiences properly.” They bemoan this being an ill-optimised game for most PC rigs.
One such user review notes that the “low challenge level” is a concern, as the harder monsters die in about 10 minutes, whereas regular ones take 4-5 minutes tops. And, of course, it should be mentioned here that the controversy began because Capcom put Patreon collabs ahead of optimisation or balance, and mostly paywalled for it. While developers can theoretically fix performance issues after launch, Dragon’s Dogma 2, where “equally poor performance did not significantly improve post-release,” is a cautionary tale.
This suggests that “work may still have to be done at an engine level” as opposed to simply hot fixing it, regardless of Capcom doing something about the initial performance backlash, but not for its final resolution. Meanwhile, some users try to patch things by swapping in other Direct Storage.dll files or clearing shader caches, but reports on this with the latest patches are mixed.
Final Thoughts
In the long run, Monster Hunter Wilds is quite a ticking bomb: on one hand, it’s a commercially successful title; on the other, widespread player dissatisfaction with technical shortcomings, most notably on PCs. Meeting these longstanding performance woes would give Capcom a fighting chance to save the game’s reputation, secured by goodwill from its enormous player base.
