Capcom have declared that they hope to bring down the recommended PC specs for open world dinosaur-tipping simulator Monster Hunter Wilds, just a month before release day on 28th February, and a few weeks ahead of the final open beta. Much like an exhausted hunter applying a carving knife to the flanks of a steaming heap of Rathalos, they shall trim and whittle their prize to its essential organs – hmm, actually we never see the concluding butchery in Monster Hunter games, now that I think of it. You just waft your knife around dramatically while the slaughtered quarry peacefully disappears and chunks of dino component materialise in your inventory.
I guess chopping off horns and tails in the preceding fight counts as “butchery”, but this process is quite stagey too, somewhat scripted, a little bit… canned. Ugh, I am getting lost in the permutations. I no longer know how to make this metaphor work. Like a hunter fleeing a Rathalos that was actually only playing dead, I must make a terrified leap to the next paragraph.
The news comes via Capcom’s German Xitter account, as reported by Eurogamer, who note that Monster Hunter Wilds’ existing PC system specs have “raised a few eyebrows” – especially given the last beta’s slight tendency to make the monsters look like angry Dali paintings. Capcom say they’re focussing on the game’s recommended GPU requirements, while also trying to improve performance. Here’s a screenshot of the current PC specs from Steam, for context.
Seeking guidance from the gods, I ran those specs by our hardware editor James. Our remote-working format made it impossible to ascertain whether his eyebrows were raised, but he didn’t seem to think the requirements were excessive. He did suggest that 140GB was quite a lot of SSD space, and that the recommended specs only allowing for 60 FPS with frame generation is a bit weird. And that the minimum GPU requirement is on the beefy side. Me, I’m still goggling at 16GB of RAM. I hear this is pretty standard nowadays, for a game with all three “A”s, but in my head, 8GB is still the norm for minimum spec.
I’m interested to know what you all think should be the minimum and recommended specs for a game of Monster Hunter Wilds stature right now. Both in terms of your own setups, and more abstractly in terms of what you consider a fair price for all those frames and pixels. Come, let us explore this vexing question as in the parable about the blind men feeling their way around the elephant, trying to ascertain its complete form. Wait a minute, this elephant has wings. It’s that bloody Rathalos again.