I’ve spent quite a lot of today trying to figure out why, exactly, some of the monsters in the Monster Hunter Wilds beta looked like bundles of copulating pyramids slathered in crocodile gravy. Nic clued me in on this reddit thread earlier, which cites unnamed Chinese players who’ve allegedly data-mined the beta’s monster models, and learned that they are extremely large, encompassing hundreds of thousands of polygons.
If every monster in Monster Hunter Wilds were that fancy all of the time, your computer would become a volcano. As such, the game resorts to loading-on-demand systems to ensure that you only see those gorgeous details when the monsters are close by and, as the case may be, angrily sitting on you. When they’re further afield, the flourishes fall away to free up memory and processing power. The popular Redditor explanation for the presence of monsters that look like Henry Moore sculpture is basically that the LOD systems are being forgetful, and neglecting to load the additional polygons at proximity.
All this comes with the severe caveat that we are talking about somebody’s patchy translation of amateur tech breakdowns that may have been totally fabricated. Capcom ain’t talking either. But the explanation is consistent with what I dimly understand of memory management in other video games. More importantly, the low poly monsters are just extremely good fun.
It isn’t particularly novel to argue that Actually, video games are more visually intriguing when you boil away a lot of detail and geometry. I did a feature about low-spec graphics for PCGamer back in the day, and have also written in glowing terms about PS1 demakes of triple-A games, together with arsey reverse-historical commentaries on Silent Hill 2. So I won’t belabour the point this time. Fortunately, I have other people to belabour it for me.
The beta’s jigsaw-dinosaurs have sparked a wave of enthusiasm on Twitter, one of those little trends that makes you think ah, maybe Twitter ain’t so bad these days, and then you spend longer than five minutes there, and nope, still awful. In amongst the complaints about optimisation, there are people attempting half-serious taxonomies of the low-poly menagerie.
There are also people making little artworks in tribute.
And there are people extending the craze to the game’s human characters, whose low poly incarnations all look awfully redolent of PS1 classic Vagrant Story, thanks to Monster Hunter’s comparable faux-medieval aesthetics.
Studying these low-poly models is a useful exercise for armchair developers like myself, inasmuch as it reveals which parts of the base monster’s appearance the Wilds artists consider essential, in order for you to perceive it as a monster at all – shape, colour, anatomy, texture, et cetera. All told, I wonder if they’d consider doubling down on the LOD glitch and making it a proper feature, perhaps with some directorial commentary. But above all, I need to know how exactly you make yourself some juicy leather pauldrons from a Chatacabra that looks like a haunted box of tissue paper.