Needless to say, things could’ve gone better for Monster Hunter Wilds on PC. The hit game suffered a plethora of performance problems and other issues, leading to a decidedly mixed reception on Steam. Ahead of new expansion Ascendance, the devs are hoping to learn more about adapting to the platform, compared to the needs of consoles.
“We’ve been working hard on bringing the lessons learned from the launch of Monster Hunter Wilds to bear on Ascendance,” Ryozo Tsujimoto, a producer on the series, tells VGC, “and it just takes a lot of time and research to examine what it is you need to achieve on PC to make the game perform well on a variety of hardware.”
Therein lies the difficulty. You need to optimize for a spectrum of potential hardware rather than the particularities of the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch 2. That doesn’t necessarily excuse the wide berth of problems players have encountered after buying Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam, especially given we were getting PC-specific patches right up to January of this year, but it does explain the struggle Capcom faced in getting the game right.
“It’s just a matter of experience really, so I’m hoping that we can bring those lessons forward into Ascendance,” he adds.
This much is correct. The team now has a lot of feedback on how to make sure Wilds runs well regardless of your setup. These days, one year and four months removed from the launch, the Steam reviews sit at Mostly Positive, suggesting the release now runs much smoother than it did back in May of last year.
That alone is a sign of good tidings for Ascendance, which is due to arrive some time next year. We don’t yet know everything that’ll be in this DLC, but it’s expected to be a large addition to the base game. There’ll be fresh parts of the map, newer creatures, and all sorts of other bits and bobs for players to enjoy. Should it run well on PC, it should give the community on that platform a second wind. And probably a third, given how many hours the average Monster Hunter fan sinks into these games.