‘Monster Hunter Wilds’ is in Trouble

Monster Hunter is a series that has gained quite a following throughout the years, while sustaining its cult audience for decades. However, the most recent title, Wilds, has fans angry, and Capcom has no current plans to win over fans again.

Despite Monster Hunter Wilds receiving a Metacritic score of 88, fans of the game have taken to platforms like Reddit, X, and Steam reviews to express their anger towards the game. As of June 22nd, the game is currently sitting at an “Overwhelmingly Negative” recent reviews, and has only retained 1% of the launch playerbase.

Monster Hunter Wilds, photo via steamcharts.com

So what happened?

Monster Hunter Wilds launched in an awful state for optimization. Gamers playing on PC have been struggling with performance from the start, and even though Capcom released a patch to help performance, it is nowhere near enough. On consoles, the frame rates are more consistent, but people have gone as far as to call it “PS3 Era Graphics,” a console released 19 years ago.

However, the performance isn’t the only issue fans are having. I haven’t personally gotten far into the game because of the performance on a computer I never struggle with, but reading Steam reviews gives me a bigger picture of what to expect when I tackle it in my backlog.

Many negative reviews mention how short the story is. Monster Hunter Wilds is the shortest game according to How Long To Beat and is shorter than the recent DLCs that were released on Monster Hunter Rise and Monster Hunter World. The average time to beat is over 17 hours, six hours shorter than Rise (a game made for the Nintendo Switch) and 29 hours less than World, the last game to come to PlayStation and Xbox consoles.

Another major criticism that I personally have of the game is the amount of walking. When the idea of an open world Monster Hunter was announced, many (myself included) were excited to see what would happen, especially after the criticism about the lengthy cutscenes in World.

Monster Hunter Wilds, photo via howlongtobeat.com

But it was clear Capcom didn’t learn anything. Due to the lack of content in the game so far, most of the story is walking and cutscenes, and it’s miserable. On the bright side, cutscenes are now skippable; instead, we just have to go through walking scenes.

Now, I’m rooting for Wilds to make a comeback. I’ve fallen in love with the recent games, and I can see the potential in Wilds, but it’s going to take a lot from Capcom to get fans to latch on like they had in World.