Monster Hunter Wilds doesn’t look or play like a game that should hit PCs this hard in 2025.
As I write this on Friday, more than 1.3 million people are actively playing Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam. So far only around 13,000—or 1%—have stopped playing long enough to review it, but those who have are largely frustrated. Steam reviews sit at a disappointed «mixed», largely citing performance issues as the reason.
And I get it. Even though I’ve had a blast playing Monster Hunter Wilds for the last two weeks on a pre-launch build, I’ve had to look past some bizarrely low-res textures and frequent framerate dips to enjoy my hunting time.
After Capcom’s big talk about weather systems and a dynamic, changing world, I kept waiting for something in Wilds to truly wow me; for its ambitions to dramatically and meaningfully change the experience in some fundamental way. Because if Monster Hunter Wilds did manage that feat, I’d be willing to overlook the pop-in, the weird half-transparent vignetting on geometry, and the lackluster framerate even in fairly sparse environments. But that hasn’t happened. So as much fun as the hunting may be, I’m left wondering why this game runs so dang badly.
In 2017, I played Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on a Wii U at a comically low 1152×648 resolution (on my 4K TV!) and it barely managed to run at 30 fps at the best of times. I didn’t care one bit. I was entranced. I played it for hours a day after work for a straight month. The world was packed with so much to discover and used physics and sound simulation and wind and weather in meaningful, open-ended ways that encouraged me to experiment and discover things for myself. Its ambitions far exceeded both my expectations and the reasonable limits of its hardware.
So, yeah, I was pretty psyched when I could play an emulated version of Breath of the Wild at 4K, 60 fps on PC a year later, but nothing could’ve stopped me from loving that game even when it was being held together by the combined spit and chewing gum of 300 Nintendo developers doing something they’d never attempted before.
If Monster Hunter Wilds made the same sort of leap over anything Capcom had ever attempted before, I’d forgive it practically anything—even its graphics permanently looking like those glitched beta abominations. But Wilds isn’t making that kind of moonshot, and without it I’m left with the frustrating sense that we’ve been in this exact mess before.
Monster Hunter: World caught flak for issues with its PC version struggling to hit 60 fps even on top-end hardware, and it was released some six months after the console version.
