Monster Hunter Wilds has been racking up the skulls, attracting well over a million simultaneous Steam players this weekend despite a mixed player reaction, with particular scorn reserved for its technical performance.
Now begins the process of patching the behemoth to address some player-reported problems with certain quests. Patching is sort of like slaughtering a Monster in reverse: sewing on horns and tails rather than chopping them off, re-embowelling the shackled form of the creature so that it can gallop across the plains, monstrous and free.
Capcom’s first hotfix – now live on Steam – isn’t actually about the Monsters, mind you. It gets rid of an issue with the Smithy whereby “weapon upgrading tutorials are repeatedly shown, disabling certain options in the menu.” They’ve also gone after a technical bungle whereby “the ‘Grill a Meal’ and ‘Ingredient Center’ features can’t be unlocked, even though the progress criteria is met by the player.”
There’s already another hotfix update coming down the pipe for problems with the Ingredient Center and Grill a Meal. This second update also tackles a more severe bug whereby a crucial NPC wouldn’t appear during the mission “A World Turned Upside Down”, blocking your progress. It launches today, March 4th, at 12am PST and 8am GMT.
Capcom are aware of additional reports that players can’t complete the main mission quest “Omens”, in which you “investigate the regions and raise your Hunter Rank”, if they’ve already reached the Hunter Rank cap. This appears to be more of an in-game miscommunication, however: even if you have reached the cap, you’ll still be able to finish this quest by collecting HR points through optional quests or side missions. “We apologise that the mission description was not comprehensive on this occasion,” Capcom comment.
I suspect many of you reading this are more interested in tune-ups for the frame-rate. In our Monster Hunter Wilds PC settings and performance guide, James called the game a “graphics card torture device” that, amongst other things, tries to use frame generation as a crutch. “Wilds is just unusually demanding in a general sense, sometimes granting a few moments of smoothness in a tight cave or confined tent yet collapsing to a nearly half that performance level once you get out into the wide open world,” he wrote.
Capcom’s launch-day troubleshooting guide leaves much to be desired, suggesting that players update their graphics drivers and try running the thing in administrator mode. Perhaps you should experiment with turning your PC on and off as well, or throwing a towel over it. Meanwhile, Capcom are taking the piss as ever with their DLC.