The Monster Hunter Wilds open beta didn't exactly go off without a hitch. In fact, there was a lot of hitching. While I delighted in having new monsters to fight and new mechanics to fight with, the Wilds beta had serious performance issues on PC and console alike. Luckily, however, game director Yuya Tokuda says we should expect to see optimization improvements when Wilds releases in February.
During my hands-on Monster Hunter Wilds preview at Capcom's Osaka HQ, I spent five hours with a more recent build of the game. Running on PS5, where players had reported their own beta performance issues, the game ran noticeably smoother than it did during the open beta on PC, without any major hangs or framerate dips. Other press attending the preview event who'd played in the beta on PS5 said it was a substantial performance improvement.
During a group interview at the preview event, Tokuda said via interpreter that we should see a similar performance improvement on PC at launch. "For the PS5 version that you are all playing today, it's different from the OBT version, and we feel you can really feel the difference in the improved framerate," Tokuda said. "The same level of framerate improvement will also be implemented on the PC for the final product."
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Tokuda also said that other visual improvements have been made since the game's open beta. "For the OBT version, there were obviously some issues with the depiction of the monster hairs and their furs. It wasn't very pretty, but we obviously have improvements there," Tokuda said.
What we shouldn't expect, however, is a return of the low-poly origami monsters produced by the beta's LOD struggles, which have since been adopted as beloved misfit children by the Monster Hunter fanbase.
When asked by my colleague Austin Wood at GamesRadar about the fanart and enthusiasm for the unintentional lo-fi monsters, executive director and art director Kaname Fujioka and series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto said—after laughing—that they appreciated the admiration for the accidental origami renderings. They would prefer that we stick to the game's recommended specs, though.
"It was a nice thing to see that people were enjoying it in a way, that they were having fun with it," Tsujimoto and Fujioka said via interpreter. "Obviously when you play on the PC, the specs vary widely depending on what kind of environment you have. So our suggestion is for people to please play on the recommended specs to get the full experience."
Monster Hunter Wilds will launch on February 28, 2025. Hopefully, we'll find performance improvements of our own when it does.
