The Monster Hunter Wilds beta isn't looking so hot, but Capcom says the full game 'is already in a more improved state'

GamesRPGMonster Hunter WildsThe Monster Hunter Wilds beta isn’t looking so hot, but Capcom says the full game ‘is already in a more improved state’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Capcom/Alternative-Vast-174)

An NPC from the Monster Hunter Wilds beta who�s been turned into a lo-poly nightmare by a graphics issue.

As a card-carrying MonHun sicko, it brings me no joy to say this: The Monster Hunter Wilds beta doesn’t bode well for a smooth launch.

Considering it’s attractinghundreds of thousands of players, the beta’s certainly enjoying plenty of attention. Unfortunately, that attention hasn’t been entirely positive. Players aren’t having the peachiest time once they’ve entered the Forbidden Lands for their demo hunts: Hunters have been reporting widespread performance struggles, while seemingly bugged LOD (level of detail) transitions are leaving their games populated with ghastly lo-poly NPCs and monster models that look straight out of a PS1 game.

Elsewhere on Reddit, in a threaddiscussing the beta’s player count, discussion quickly shifted as users across a spectrum of PCs shared their experiences with the beta’s spotty performance. “I’m on aRyzen5 5600/RTX 3060, decent mid-range stuff, and I barely hit 30FPS a lot of the time without DLSS on Medium settings,“one redditorsaid. “With it I can hit 50-60 but the world seems to be smeared in vaseline, not a great tradeoff!”

“There definitely seems to be a CPU bottleneck or something when it comes to the framerate in town,” saidanother userrunning an AMD Ryzen 5800X and an Nvidia RTX 3080, “because I found changing graphics settings made very little difference (I only gained like 10FPS going from High/Ultra to Low).”

While I haven’t experienced any monsters devolving into polygonal frankensteins, I’ve been enduring my own performance issues with the Wilds beta. In addition to low framerates and frequent LOD pop-in, the game’s got a constant bleary ghosting effect, even when I’ve disabled any kind of upscaling. I can tinker with things until it’s playable enough to hunt a monster, but I wouldn’t call it an enjoyable level of performance.

Much as I’d like to say otherwise, this doesn’t come as a complete surprise. After Dragon’s Dogma 2 generated its share ofperformance woesearlier this year, Capcom didn’t inspire confidence when it revealed that the recommendedMonster Hunter Wilds system specswere only targeting 1080p/60fps with medium settings and frame generation enabled. Dragon’s Dogma 2 notablygot a patch in September, six months after release, to improve “frame rates in areas with a lot of NPCs, such as town centers” which were apparently suffering due to “CPU overload.” Both games run on Capcom’s internal RE Engine.

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Capcom seems aware of the beta issues. This morning, the official Monster Hunter account on Xtweetedthat the full game “is already in a more improved state compared to the beta test.” Capcom also provided atroubleshooting guidefor the beta, with your standard suggestions of updating your GPU drivers and—let’s see here—making sure your Windows Media Player codecs are up to date? Can’t hurt, I guess. (Unless it does.)

I’d love to know what, specifically, is already “in a more improved state,” but we likely won’t know until the full Monster Hunter Wilds launch on February 28. Hopefully Capcom can fit a healthy amount of optimization work into the next four months. Until then, I’ll be running the numbers on how many PC upgrades I’m willing to invest in sword fights with dinosaurs.

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