So What Did Go Wrong With Monster Hunter Wilds?

 

Some of you might be confused by the title and are asking "but Jonsku, didn't both you and Ben really like the game and even recommend it in the Review?" Yes, we did indeed reader! However, with that being said, there are quite a few things to we need to talk about when it comes to the game. And, even though we like it, it's not a perfect game. 

Now don't get me wrong! I still like the game a lot, and play it on a semi weekly basis, but there are some new core features and decisions made by Capcom that makes me a bit . . . Concerned over the Monster Hunter franchise's future, and feel that it needs to be brought up. 

So lets dive right in to see exactly what I'm talking about.

The Current PC Optimization

I was rather critical over the PC port of the game in the review, but I failed to illustrate with my words how bad it actually is, and how bad it STILL IS. 

 

After the launch, and in current updates, Capcom has tried to fix and optimize the game as much as they can while also developing new content for it, but it just hasn't been enough. The game is still suffering from serious performance issues, and new ones crop up when you least expect it after every update. For me the game ran fairly decently at launch, but after one update it had this weird lag spikes when you go into the game, and it takes a legit 5-10 minutes for it to calm down. Not sure what the reason even could be, especially considering it wasn't an issue before. A friend of mine with a lower end PC consistently gets what the community likes to call "Play Station1 Graphics" during gameplay. They do correct themselves fairly quickly, but it just showcases how poorly optimized Wilds really is for current PC. 

To be honest, I am quite shocked they didn't take the same approach they did with the previous major title. Monster Hunter World's PC port received six months of extra development time before it was released, and while it might have been annoying for us PC players to wait, we got a much more stable port than Wilds because of this. It ended up being a much better long term experience.

It has been a growing trend in gaming where it feels like you, as a player and as a customer, get punished for wanting to play games early. More often than not, it's the later adapters that get the best experience with the most optimized performance, and enough content to satisfy them (more on this later). . . It really shouldn't be like this, and I genuinely wish that Capcom learns from this for the future! At the time of writing this article, and if Steam numbers is to be believed, Wilds has lost 90% of its players already. Now granted this is to be expected to a certain degree, because unlike most live service games, Wilds is more of a "you play as much as you want, and farm what you want and then be done if you want" kind of game, and people are waiting for updates.

However, it's still a huge drop, especially if we compare the stats between World and Wilds during their launches, where (and of course taking Steam DB with a bit of a grain of salt) World still had around 50k of its players active when it was only a few months old. I don't know if players are gonna come back on PC if these optimization problems persist, and honestly Capcom should have waited with the PC release as they did with World.

The Current End Game

I did write an article about what you can do in Wilds Endgame once you got there, and don't get me wrong, there is a lot of stuff to do. 

The thing I am wondering about though, is that why isn't there more monsters on launch? For some of you newer fans of this franchise that might sound like a weird question, but let me give a bit of context: The older Monster Hunter games all the way from MH2 had this tendency to reuse the monsters from the previous games to fill up the roster of available monster for a player to take down. Re-using content is usually seen in modern gaming in a negative light, but MH is unique in that regard because of how repayable each monster really is.

World had the excuse that it was a whole new engine and a big step up for the franchise to go onto main consoles again, before that Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate was a 3DS exclusive, Monster Hunter Tri and 3 Ultimate were on Wii and Wii U respectively, and before that the franchise was on PlayStation 2 and then mostly PSP. The series kind of skipped PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles (with the exception of Frontier) and stayed very true to the "classic" style of gameplay the entire time.

World had to not only update the core gameplay, but also had to update every single monster they added to change their behaviors, move sets, and in particular speed to balance them out to the new gameplay style

Wilds doesn't really have that excuse, now does it? It has better gameplay in my opinion than World had at launch, and the monsters are impressive and fun to take down. However, they don't move THAT differently from World's monsters, so why couldn't we get more monsters from World in the base game of Wilds? We have the variant of Anjanath for example, but why don't we have the regular base version of the it that breathes fire? Glavenus is also a monster strangely absent considering its from the same generation as Mizutsune. 

I am not gonna sit and pretend I know everything going on behind the scenes in Capcom, and I can understand that they don't want to take away from World too much. All I am asking is why weren't there more when it was possible?

Lastly, There should have been a layered weapon option on launch because Artian weapons are really ugly (I feel for you Dual blade mains).

Seikret is Overpowered?

Our faithful and easily loveable bird companion during hunts has made the life of being a hunter much easier than ever before. That being said, it could just be that it has made things TOO EASY.

As much convenience the bird provides it also takes away a lot of the core things we like about Monster Hunter, especially compared to what we did in World. You don't really have to learn the environments or the natural habitats of monsters because your bird literally since the start always knows where the monster is. It leaves us with the question of: Are you actually a hunter in Wilds? 

In World you had to explore the environment properly to gain not only a better understanding of the monsters, but to find their tracks and clues to get that auto feature on the map unlocked and only after fighting and researching each monster properly did you naturally learn everything about it and get rewarded with easily finding it on the map. It made it feel like you slowly overtime as an actual hunter learnt your preys every move and could find it easily after gaining enough experience.

I wish for Wilds they would have compromised and combined these two ideas together. Instead of the bird knowing from the start where everything is it would instead help you find the tracks of the monsters and overtime get used to every preys unique smells etc. To find them much easier each time. 

Of course it is a question of balance because if it becomes an auto feature regardless after enough play why can't it be unlocked from the very start you may ask? In my opinion it just takes away the reason to actually explore the environments or the game itself. I have played with a group of friends of mine where two of them were completely new to the franchise and if I asked one of them "where does X monster usually spawn on this map." They wouldn't have a clue, even if it was Rey Dau who almost always start at his lair. They haven't had an incentive to explore even with side quests because they have been carried by the bird since the start.

I don't have a full answer to how this can be fixed, because I do also enjoy the convenience of being able to carry two weapons and being able to sharpen on the go etc, but it's a shame it has taken away so much from exploring the game.

The Story

Anyone familiar with the franchise since earlier days knows that MH has never really been about story telling (which is a shame considering it does have good lore and good settings to make better stories, the spin offs proved that). The issue with Wilds is the pacing of it, for a baffling unknown reason Capcom didn't learn from World that making the story mostly single player or rather very inconvenient to join each other during it that there is not much point in doing the story together until it opens up in High rank. 

Wilds story is very fast paced, to the point of being a detriment to it. Pacing has to be fast because people want to be able to play together ASAP but it really hurts some of the characters in the story because we don't get enough time or good setup to care that much from them. Mainly Nata suffers from this pace. Most players I have asked have told me this one thing: "I HATE NATA! He is so annoying! Can we just feed him to the monsters? Why do I have to listen to this whiny kid!" 

I didn't have these issues as much as others, because I can see what they were trying to do with him and what kind of development he got to the end of HR. However, I would be lying if I didn't say that his story felt very awkward because it had good setup at the start! The pacing just killed a lot of the momentum because we had to get to the next story beat rapidly so that the player can get to HR faster. . . . . So why couldn't they spread it out?

Seriously why did we have to have the full main story in Low Rank? In World they did spread it to HR which made it a better paced story even if the story telling wasn't that good. I think Capcom should have looked at games like Final Fantasy XIV, and how it allows players to experience the story together, they didn't have to go separately into dungeons or big fights to do them. 

There is a decent story in Wilds at the end of the day, but due to its pacing and baffling design choices with how the player interacts with it, just gives us a rather frustrating experience and poor Nata is the one that takes the full brunt of that frustration from players. To be honest, the newer players I played with in my friend group just started skipping story because they wanted to play together, and I think that is a rather big oversight by the developers that they didn't think to include the story in a more natural way into the multiplayer itself.

The UI

Let's be honest, the UI in Wilds is very confusing and badly designed, it takes hours to start grasping it and more often than not I had to explain to my fellow new hunters where to find info about their armor, where to find multiplayer stuff, where to find the hunts in that menu, on and on and on. 

World had similar issues with its UI but somehow the problem has gotten worse in Wilds, there is just so many options that feels like it would have been better if they had condensed them into less menus somehow. I am not a UI designer so again I won't claim to know how to fix this but there is a problem when more often than not players get confused about how to just navigate the game their playing.

Closing Thoughts

At the end of the day I do still like Wilds a lot and looking forward to its future updates. However, as much as I love it I felt that some of the worrying signs for the future could affect the game and in particular future Monster Hunter titles. Hopefully Capcom takes into consideration with how launching a product too early will affect the franchise negatively and lose player trust. The PC port though has no excuse, it should have stayed in the oven for longer. 

Those are my thoughts though and opinions at the end of the day, what do you think reader? Agree with my points? Disagree? Or maybe you have even more to add do tell in the comments below! I want to hear what you think.