I feel a little bad for Monster Hunter Wilds, a game I spent a very enjoyable 60-odd hours in, which is nonetheless currently tanking a severe “Overwhelmingly Negative” recent review rating on Steam.
The problems are twofold: Firstly, the game hasn’t quite hit the same gameplay loop as past games, trading out (from what I’ve heard—I’m green to the genre) complexity for ease-of-use, much to its detriment.
That’s more of a subjective complaint, but the real bugbear’s been Capcom’s inability to optimise the dang thing—even with these woes happening at launch. Generally, games with iffy performance tend to even out after a few months. Not so here.
After its first layer of emergency measures (putting Gemma in a swimsuit) didn’t work, Capcom appears to be doing a second actual emergency big haul to bring the game back up into the good graces of the gaming public: Fixing the endgame thing.
As a post to X reads, the “expansion of endgame content which was originally planned as part of Title Update three in late September will now be released ahead of schedule as part of the Ver.1.021 update.”
This expansion includes a new level of quest difficulty for endgame players, a new rewards system to go alongside it, “featuring Talismans with random skill combinations”, and balance adjustments that’ll cover “more weapons than initially planned”. That means that Capcom needs a bit more time to cook things up, pushing Ver.1.021 to August 13, but it’s still a huge swing, and one I’m a touch nervous about.
Game development isn’t magic, after all—and if Capcom really is trying to pull up on the game’s Steam review nose-dive, this could be considered a risky move on the developer’s part. Gamers will get irate about performance problems, but buggy patches? Hoo boy, you don’t wanna put out a buggy patch.
If the studio sticks the landing, though (or has just been working ahead of schedule), then this could be just the ticket. Both harder difficulties and some talismans to grind sound like what the masses have been yearning for.
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