While Monster Hunter Wilds received a lot of praise at launch, the longer-term fortunes of the game four months later have been dismal.
Both review sentiment and playercount have collapsed. On Steam, recent reviews are just 18% positive, giving the game the dreaded Overwhelmingly Negative classification and dropping its overall reviews to “mixed.”
Playercount is even crazier. Monster Hunter Wilds now has fewer concurrent players on Steam than the seven-year-old, 2018 Monster Hunter World, which fans have deemed the superior long-term game.
The negative reviews are largely split into two camps. The first is the fact that PC performance is horrible, and for many, seemingly getting worse over time with Capcom’s fixes failing or not coming fast enough, even months after release. Here’s one excerpt:
“Unfortunately, I can’t recommend this game in its current state. Performance is awful even on a very high-end PC, and crashes are frequent especially if you enable frame generation which the game recommends as soon as you open it.”
That seems to be the more pressing issue, but further complaints highlight a lacking endgame that has not been expanded enough over time, despite Capcom’s stated plans to add more interesting and engaging content.
Speaking from personal experience, as someone who sunk maybe 10 total hours into past Monster Hunter games, I found myself reaching the end, grinding the best gear, and running out of stuff to do relatively quickly into what was supposed to be the endgame. Despite some new monsters and new difficulty increases, it’s just not enough, and so fans are heading back to Monster Hunter World.
Wilds launched with 1.38 million concurrent players. It’s now peaking at around 17,000 a day, around 1.23% of launch. Some may now cite the old “you can’t judge a game’s playercount this far after launch” idea, but yes, in this case, you absolutely can. As evidenced by Worlds, the seven-year-old game, this is a series meant to be played and grinded for an extremely long time. Dropping to 1% of its playercount just four months after release, and below Worlds, is absolutely abysmal; there’s just no getting around that.
Monster Hunter Wilds will be releasing its second title update at the end of this month. Title Update 1 briefly tripled the game’s players but soon lost them, and sentiment around the game has gotten increasingly worse since then. Unless this new update comes with a huge amount of fixes and content, it’s unlikely to reverse the game’s fortunes, and Capcom needs to pull back and figure out what went wrong here and how to truly fix it.
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