Capcom was previously scheduled to hold a CEDEC panel anchored in Monster Hunter Wilds and explaining “everything you need to know about optimization,” as Automaton reports, but the talk has now been canceled amid ongoing, orbiting concerns.
There are two important pieces of context here. Firstly, just days ago Capcom issued a (Japanese) statement addressing harassment directed at its staff, and while specifics were scarce, there’s little room for doubt that Capcom was indirectly talking about angry Monster Hunter Wilds players launching personal attacks or threats.
Capcom said (via machine translation) that it takes customer opinions and requests seriously, but in the case of such attacks and threats, it will “respond appropriately” with potential for severe cases to warrant legal action.
This brings us to the other piece. Monster Hunter Wilds is not exactly a poster child for optimization. I played it on a normal PS5 for our Monster Hunter Wilds review and didn’t have any issues, but I’ve since jumped to PC, and yeah, it still runs terribly on many PCs.
Despite some stellar new monsters to fight, a string of updates have plunged the game into Overwhelmingly Negative recent reviews on Steam (and Mixed overall). As expected, the vast majority of these reviews skewer the game’s performance.
Capcom has not explicitly said this talk was canceled over fears of inciting further harassment, but the writing is on the wall. Anything the company says about optimization right now is sure to get harpooned by unhappy PC players who have questions of their own about Capcom’s optimization process.
This isn’t Capcom’s first botched PC port, but Wilds has proven to be one of its most severe. Monster Hunter World didn’t launch ship-shape on PC either, but I remember it improving markedly faster than Wilds has. The series’ most recent release, Monster Hunter Rise, being an ex-Nintendo Switch game, generally ran very smoothly by contrast.
Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2, meanwhile, fared much more poorly, to the point that PC is still handily the worst place to play the game. We can only hope that Wilds, already one of Capcom’s best-selling games, can avoid the same fate with future performance improvements. That said, this game came out at the end of February and people ain’t getting any younger.
