A wildly good time
Last week, Capcom released a Monster Hunter: Wilds' beta for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Steam. While some users had some crazy errors due to Wilds' huge requirements, I played it on both Playstation 5 and Steam.
I wanted to quickly go over the good, the bad and the ugly from the Monster Hunter: Wilds' beta.
The Good
Performance
Very quickly: Performance is going to be a YMMV (your mileage may vary), especially on PC. I'll touch on that here and later in this article. So let's start with the good parts of performance:
Monster Hunter: Wilds ran pretty well on my Playstation 5. The game is visually stunning and the weather patterns, while extremely quick in this beta, didn't cause anything in the game to glitch out or stutter. My party went from a lightning storm to sunshine with no problems. That's a good thing when weather is going to play a crucial role in Wilds. Almost everything will be impacted by the weather, from endemic life spawning to resources being available to the appearance of Apex monsters.
The console version seemed locked at 30 frames per second and truthfully it didn't bother me. This was all but confirmed by Capcom back in August, so hunters should already be in the know. With that said, I first played the beta on the Playstation 5 and the capped frame rate didn't throw me off at all. Again, the game ran quite smoothly.
PC was quite a different story, obviously. First thing's first: Monster Hunter: Wilds' specs are BEEFY. The recommended specs of an RTX 2070 Super and Ryzen 5 5500 means this game is going to pump out some serious graphical fidelity.
Thankfully, my PC was able to handle what Monster Hunter: Wilds was throwing at it. The Steam version of the game can run with uncapped frames, though I wanted to give 4K a true run through and capped my frames at 75. I also went with the game's medium settings suggestions, which didn't take away from the graphical beauty at all.
I am happy to report that I was able to get 50-75 frames during combat and lesser (40-50) in the 100 player packed camps. I'll take that as a win from a game with such large specs. This, however, will come to play when I talk about the bad because Capcom doesn't have a great history of PC optimization. You can look towards the launch of Monster Hunter World and Dragon's Dogma 2 for more information on that.
Graphics
Monster Hunter: Wilds is a beautiful game. Beta allowed us to play the first chapter of the story, where you rescue a young girl and her older brother from a Chatacabra, a large toad like creature. The cutscenes blended seamlessly with the action and everything seemed quite crisp and nice to look at, despite it just being rocks and sand.
Where the game truly opens up is the "open world" map. Once you've finished the first chapter of the story, you're allowed to stroll the wild plains of this new world. There is where you'll see small roaming packs of monster (they do move in herds!) or endemic life just living their best life. The weather will dynamically change from something like a bright sunny day to a thunder and lightning storm and suddenly those packs are huddled under a tree to keep safe.
Everything looks really good on both Playstation 5 and Steam with Steam getting the nod for better graphics. This really shouldn't surprise anyone.
Monsters
I really enjoyed all three fights that Capcom laid before us. I already mentioned our first fight with the Chatacabra. I think Chatacabra will act like Monster Hunter World's Great Jagras, a fun introductory monster that will be incredibly useful to warm hunters up.
The next quest was to hunt the alpha Doshaguma, a large bear-like dog creature that runs in packs. This was something, to my knowledge, that hasn't happened in Monster Hunter yet. In my runs, the alpha Doshaguma was surrounded by two smaller Doshagumas who immediately get involved in the fight because the alpha tells them to. To get them away from the alpha, you need to strategically use dung pods.
Its possible that based on this fight that Doshaguma is the first skill check fight much like World's Anjanath. The Anjanath was a really tough, quick and physical T-Rex style monster that would no problem lighting your ass on fire and if you didn't have a build ready. I could see Doshaguma being the same way.
When angry, this big beast hits real hard and real fast. A few times Doshaguma has caught my very veteran hunting party unaware and carted us.
Last is Rey Dau. Rey Dau is the apex predator of the Windward Plains who controls lightning which is why he will appear when massive lightning storms are sweeping across the area. Rey Dau was a GREAT fight that reminded me of white knuckle fights in World with monsters like Velkhana.
I don't want to spoil Rey Dau's moveset because I feel like most hunters should be experiencing it first hand, but he was some nasty moves when angry.
Crossplay Finally. And it worked pretty well. There were a few times when someone from my party would disconnect, but we're chalking it up to being a beta (hopefully).
The Bad
Weapon heftiness
During the beta, I used my three favorite weapons: Hunting Horn, Sword and Shield and Charge Blade. The movesets of these weapons feel pretty good. There are some difference from World, including focus moves which allows you to open wounds on an a monster to create more collectible pieces.
However, the heftiness of the weapons felt...off. This is a hard thing to explain, but when I was hitting a monster with an oversized saxophone, it didn't feel like I was smacking a monster 2x or 3x times the size of me with a weapon I can barely hold. Maybe it is just some really bad audio cues and with some added bass, it would sound better, but it just didn't feel as hefty as World.
This isn't a massive problem, so I don't want someone to come away with this as a major complaint, but when you are spending 99% of your time hitting things, it would feel nice to have some beef to it.
Link Party System Crossplay, good. Capcom's Link Party system, not great. I understand why the link party system is there. You need an internal management system to allow people to link up, but the way you do that feels incredibly cumbersome.
Basically, you need to have one person go to their hunter info and give another person their hunter code. Player 1 then has to go through a few menus and add Player 2 as a friend. Then you invite Player 2 to a link party. A link party doesn't mean this person joins your lobby, but when you post a quest, they can join it from the quest giver Alma and then they'll join your party.
While the above paragraph seems quite easy, it isn't explained anywhere how to do this. I had to look it up on a different website because it was unknown by my party how to join one another. Once we were able to get it situated, it is pretty easy.
Capcom not having a tutorial for this, but everything else in the game is such a Capcom thing to do.
Monsters Running So Much Rey Dau seemed to be the monster that ran the most for us. For such an apex predator, he'd plop down, do a move and take off again. I hope it is tweaked for release day because it was very annoying.
The Ugly
100 Player lobbies Get rid of these things, please. They're horrible. When you're out on a quest with your party, people spamming messages in the camp are still played on your screen. It was incredibly annoying to be in a white knuckle fight against Rey Dau and have 'OK' stickers being spammed by folks not in the fight.
My hope is that Capcom will give us the ability to turn off the messaging or allow us to have private servers.
Performance I was lucky when it came to performance. My rig is pretty beefy so Monster Hunter: Wilds didn't have many issues, but others weren't so lucky. Look at this:
It's a shame because the game is really beautiful, but it should also be able to run on a majority of machines. It wouldn't surprise me to see Monster Hunter: Wilds launch with poor optimization because as I mentioned earlier, there is a track record with this.
Clunky Seikret controls
I didn't really like the Seikrets and unfortunately, I believe they're here to stay. They don't control well and aren't very fast, even when sprinting. I was hoping they'd be as fast as the Palamutes in Rise, but they're maybe half the speed when sprinting.
Actually, it felt like Monster Hunter: Wilds had too many controls in general. There was always something telling you to push this or do that to make something happen.
But Overall...
I really enjoyed my time with Monster Hunter: Wilds' beta. I am looking forward to the game releasing on February 28, 2025 for Steam, Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
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