Capcom's Monster Hunter Wilds updates have backed it into a corner

This week saw the release of the version 1.021 update for Monster Hunter Wilds, adding yet another difficulty tier to high level hunts and pairing them with a new endgame grind that opens up new buildcrafting potential. Like the additions in previous post-release patches and Title Updates, these are welcome changes, answering the complaints of players who've wanted more challenge and a reason to keep coming back for more monster hunting.

They're good updates. But they're not enough.

Performance issues remain the heaviest weight keeping Wilds pressed firmly in the swamp of negative player sentiment. On Steam, its recent reviews are still stuck at "Mostly Negative," and featured most prominently in that procession of glaring red downward thumbs is a parade of baffling performance reports.

Despite previous attempted fixes to alleviate texture streaming issues, Wilds hunters have continually suffered hitches, frame drops, crashes, input delays, and connection errors—all seemingly tied to DirectStorage-related CPU bottlenecking that's been evident since users started prerelease benchmarking back in February.

In the latest letter from game director Yuya Tokuda, Capcom finally acknowledged that there is something busted with Wilds' CPU usage. And it's apparently so thoroughly, fundamentally busted that it'll require multiple stages of fixes, the first of which is planned to land two major updates from now in winter.

By some quirk of fate, I've been spared the worst Wilds performance hits. Outside of an occasional stint where it'll act like my SSD has the transfer speeds of a USB flash drive, Wilds runs alright for me. I'll survive. But if I'm a rare case because I'm not suffering from port issues so profound that they won't be fixed until almost a year after launch, the game should've launched that much later.

Fallow season

As dire as it is, performance isn't Wilds' only issue—its dire sales drop-off is testament to that. After two major title updates, it feels adrift, like it's been waiting for some greater, guiding direction that never fully materialized. I think it's a curse of its own design. In our Wilds review, I wrote about my disappointment with what seemed like Capcom streamlining away some of Monster Hunter's identity. As months have gone on, I've become convinced that wasn't just a matter of taste.

By overcorrecting for a more approachable Monster Hunter, Capcom's made a Monster Hunter at odds with itself.

Armor skills are part of the problem. In what seemed like an effort to simplify buildcrafting for new players, Capcom hacked up the armor skill system, offloading some of those skills onto weapons and leaving armor sets with more clearly-defined skill offerings: easier to parse, but narrower in scope.

Meanwhile, Wilds at launch was a deliberately easier game. At the time, I thought that was a price worth paying if it meant more hunters taking the field. An unintended consequence of fighting easier monsters, however, is that you're less incentivized to specialize your equipment for specific targets. Instead, you're more likely than ever to pluck the most useful bits of the simplified armor tree to cobble together a one-size-hunts-all armor set.

And, compared to melding systems in previous Monster Hunter games, Wilds has fewer ways to put materials from early game monsters to use if you aren't interested in turning them into hats and slacks. They can be fed into the Artian weapon slot machine—but when monsters aren't terribly demanding, what do you really need a god roll Artian weapon for?

In Rise, I was content to hop into random hunts and hammer away at lizards with strangers because I could always melt down the resulting bits into potentially useful amulet rolls. In Wilds, I became almost immediately hyperfocused on the game's high end monsters. Why waste time on a Rathalos if it isn't offering you anything worth carving for and fighting it is as engaging as folding tissue paper? Meanwhile, the marquee environment systems seem left over from a more ambitious vision for the game that never came to be, their biggest impact being the muddy fallow season graphics that players are still complaining about. Seasons and weather never really make hunts harder or more interesting.

Capcom's backed itself into a corner where players are demanding harder hunts and have no reason to bother with anything else. Outside of new monster additions, its post-launch strategy has consisted of incremental difficulty bumps for endgame monsters: first they were all brought up to 8-star tempered parity, and now they've each got their 9-star tempered variants.

But making the same set of monsters harder is a card you can only play so many times. Even this week's early deployment of the new endgame amulet grind feels like a stopgap addition. Capcom chased the dream of wider, more open environments to the point of grinding PCs to a halt, and now we're ignoring all but 9 of the 32 large monsters that can populate them.

More than five months out from launch, Wilds is frustrating: The core activity of taking a weapon and dueling a dinosaur with it feels better than it ever has, but it needs an expansion-sized update to do it justice. I'm just not sure how much good will Capcom's going to have left to work with by the time that expansion could arrive.