Monster Hunter Wilds live coverage: All the launch day news

So the game… does not run great on PC

Monster Hunter Wilds may have smashed the one million concurrent milestone (and continues to climb), but that doesn’t mean it’s all peaches and cream in the Forbidden Lands.

The game is currently sitting at a Mixed rating on Steam, with thousands of negative reviews pouring in to criticise the game’s poor graphics, frame rate, and a ridiculous number of crashes that seem to be occurring for folk.

I’m having some pretty damning frame dips myself, and have gone to hide in a singleplayer lobby for the time being lest a hundred hunters end up cooking my rig like a Well-done Steak. If you’re experiencing crashes yourself, you might want to peep our reviewer Lincoln’s helpful advice around frame generation. He was having a huge number of crashes before turning it off, which seems to have stabilised his game somewhat.

🚨 Monster Hunts Wilds breaks the one million mark! 🚨

Holy crap, Capcom has only gone and done it. Monster Hunter Wilds has officially hit over one million concurrent players, and seems to be climbing by the minute.

If you didn’t know, the game has been out on PC for seven hours as of this record. Only seven hours!

It’s a huge milestone for the game and for Capcom’s PC library: It’s triple the concurrents seen in Monster Hunter: World. It’s also, unsurprisingly, the most concurrents any Capcom PC release has ever seen. The more surprising part is perhaps the fact that second and third place are taken by Capcom Arcade Stadium and Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium respectively, both of which peaked at roughly half the number of players as Wilds.

I’m excited to see how much higher this number can go. Will we see 1.5 million later today? Who knows!

You know about capturing monsters, right?

Veteran hunters are nodding their heads already, but if you’re new to Monster Hunter with Wilds, you may not know that you don’t actually have to kill the monsters, most of the time! There’s another option: once you’ve beaten the tar out of them, you can deploy a trap and use tranquilizer bombs to subdue the creature instead.

As outlined in our article on capturing monsters in MH Wilds, there are some significant benefits to the more humane finish. The biggest one is that you’re ending the hunt earlier, during the phase of battle when the monster is often at its angriest and most dangerous. That’s clutch in harder fights or hunts with strict time limits where failure’s a real risk. As for the rewards you get for killing and carving vs. capturing, there isn’t a clear better choice—check our guide for the more detailed breakdown.

Make sure to claim your bonus items from playing the Wilds beta

Did you participate in one of Wilds’ beta tests? If so, you’ve got some helpful loot and a cute little pendant waiting for you in the final game. Here’s how to claim the Monster Hunter Wilds beta rewards shortly after the start of the campaign (basically as soon as you set up camp!).

Look at that cute Felyne charm you get for beta testing. Delightful!

*So* close to the one million milestone

Monster Hunter Wilds came ridiculously close to breaking one million concurrent players around two hours into its launch, before peaking at 987,482 players.

I’m gonna put that down to the launch being at a bit of a crummy time for some American and British hunters, and part of me expects to see that record being broken later today when the weekend is upon us and everyone can dive at a reasonable time.

It’s still maintaining a very healthy player count nearly six hours in though, having not yet dropped below the 900,000 mark at the time of writing. It’s currently the second-most played game on Steam right now, behind Counter-Strike 2.

Do you have the day off to play? If so, just know I am incredibly jealous.

Good morning, UK hunters!

Hey there hunters, Mollie checking in to give you the live deets of what’s going on in Monster Hunter Wilds: Community posts, milestones, developer updates, the whole lot.

Catch you in the next update! In the meantime, I’ll be resisting the urge to hop on, grab my Hunting Horn and get dooting in some SOS Flares.

Monster Hunter Wilds has passed Banana (and Elden Ring)

Not so tough now, huh Banana?

And there it is: Into the Steam Top 10 all-time club

Monster Hunter Wilds has broken into the top 10 all-time Steam records an hour after launch

It keeps going up: another 13,000 people have logged on since I published that news story five minutes ago!

*hacker voice* I’m in

Monster Hunter Wilds’ servers seem to be working, though it did take me about a full minute to login. That’s probably inevitable when you go from zero to 854,162 players in less than an hour!

If you’re having trouble launching the game and getting the “Sorry, something went wrong” error pop-up, you probably don’t need to validate your game files. Just try again: It looks like the Denuvo DRM’s server is struggling to validate under the heavy traffic load. Thanks DRM! We can always count on you.

Monster Hunter Wilds is already closing in on the Top 10 all-time player counts on Steam

Just half an hour after going live, Wilds already has more than 738,000 people playing and is closing in on Baldur’s Gate 3’s record from 2023.

It’s more than doubled Monster Hunter: World’s all-time record of 334,684, according to SteamDB.

Dang.

Monster Hunter Wilds is currently the top game on Twitch

Just Chatting doesn’t count, right?

Not bad for a nighttime launch in North America and Europe.

:absolutecinema:

The Steam Points shop for Wilds is now live with 12 items, including:

• 7 profile backgrounds for 500 points each
• 5 emoticons for 100 points each

Oh, right. First: Unpacking

Waiting on time bjusy for this to hppen be like from r/MonsterHunter

Monster Hunter Wilds is out!

Player count watch begins now. How high will Wilds climb on the Steam Most Played chart?

How hungry are people for Monster Hunter Wilds?

• It’s been among the top 100 bestselling games on Steam for 12 weeks straight
• It’s the #1 wishlisted game on Steam, beating out Hollow Knight: Silksong, Elden Ring Nightreign, Dune: Awakening and Borderlands 4
• Its predecessor Monster Hunter: World is still drawing some 50,000 simultaneous daily players more than six years later

One hour to go!

Monster Hunter Wilds unlocks on Steam in another 59 minutes. Anyone else trying to squeeze in a full Balatro run before then? Where’s my Friends of Jimbo monster pack, anyway? I need a Meowscular Chef Joker.

The first things you should do when you boot up Monster Hunter Wilds

In addition to our general Monster Hunter Wilds tips, we’ve got some advice geared towards what you should do from the very start of the game when you begin your adventure. These aren’t specifically “beginner’s tips” for new hunters—they’re for everyone jumping into Wilds!

7 things to do first in Monster Hunter Wilds

What the heck? There are already Monster Hunter Wilds mods on Nexus

This game isn’t even out yet and there are 26 mods on the Nexus page. Perhaps the beta gave modders the files they needed to tinker with? A couple that immediately caught my eye:

Daisy Ridley: Monster Hunter?

Welcome to Monster Hunter – Presented by Daisy Ridley – YouTube

Watch On

Remember when Capcom got Star Wars’ Rey Skywalker to narrate an overview of the Monster Hunter series? That was kinda strange. Not that I’m complaining! I’m just wondering if she plays Long Sword or what. (Somewhere the one guy who hasn’t mentally suppressed the ending of Rise of Skywalker is shouting “Dual Blades!!!”).

Do you think they asked Milla Jovovich first?

Monster Hunter Wilds unlock times: When does it go live again!?

This is what we all really care about, isn’t it?

*Eric Andre rattling the gates to the Steam download servers* Let me iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnn!!!!

We’ve all still got a bit of a wait: Monster Hunter Wilds goes live on PC in just 3 hours. We’ve got a MH Wilds release times post dedicated to the full timezone breakdown, but here’s the all-important chart that makes it easy to grok at a glance.

Reminder: If you haven’t downloaded Wilds yet, it does allow preloading. Get on it before those servers get hammered!

Revisit Monster Hunter’s legacy while you wait to play

Check out our video tour of Monster Hunter’s journey from not-so-beloved PS2 dino-battler to Capcom’s bestselling game of all time with 2018’s World.

Speaking of 2018, when World was releasing on PC we published an even more in-depth look at Monster Hunter’s history: How Monster Hunter rose from niche import to an international sensation. Former Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine editor James Mielke was there in 2003 the first time Capcom ever showed Monster Hunter to press—call him fan #1. Here’s an excerpt from his first-hand account:

“Capcom showed us plenty of other games, but Monster Hunter was all I wanted to know about. I expected plenty of button-mashing and sword swinging, but the dev team had other ideas. The producer who took the podium said that instead of using the usual button schemes to attack, weapon moves would be mapped to the right-analog stick to simulate the heft and feel of a broadsword.

As progressive as this idea was, the execution was weak, and the game was not a hit when it came out in 2004. Whether it was the basic concept or the actual hands-on experience, the first Monster Hunter just didn’t click with the masses, and the next couple of expansions and sequels would stay in Japan. It wasn’t until Monster Hunter Freedom 2 that we’d get another taste…

Unfortunately the advent of ad-hoc multiplayer didn’t do much for me in the US, as none of my friends or co-workers were really putting much time in on their PSPs. But thanks to a tedious half-hour morning commute on San Francisco’s 38 Geary bus line, I had a lot of time on my hands. So a-hunting I would go, solo. Through the years, each expansion and sequel would add slightly better graphics, new villages, different NPCs, tougher ranks, more gear, and—once the series hit 3DS—extensive DLC. None of this changed my monster hunting fortunes, though. I was primarily a solo hunter in the U.S. wishing I was a Japanese kid in Tokyo.

The majority of Japanese school kids live in densely populated urban environments. During my trips to Japan it was common to see four or more kids gathered under a tree by their school, outside a ‘conbini’ (convenience store), or even on a train playing Monster Hunter together. While I was running around solo on my PSP, rank 3, slowly grinding out quests, these 12 year-olds were probably taking down an HR9 Rajang like it was nothing…

Eventually I moved to Japan for about five years—not to play Monster Hunter, but to work for game developer Q Entertainment, though I can’t deny it was a pretty sweet perk. I suddenly and miraculously had no shortage of access to skilled Monster Hunter players. One thing you can rely on with Japanese gamers is that when something’s hot, everyone is playing it.”

Monster Hunter Wilds PC performance analysis: Upscaling is a must

PC Gamer hardware writer Nick Evanson put Monster Hunter Wilds through an intense battery of tests on four different hardware configurations to pin down just how demanding the game is on both CPUs and graphics cards. How does Wilds compare to last year’s Dragon’s Dogma 2, an open world RPG that also ran on Capcom’s proprietary RE Engine? In his Dragon’s Dogma 2 performance analysis Nick wrote that the game will “take everything your PC has and still want more,” and not too much has changed in the past year.

There is a spot of good news, though: Wilds “is far less of a CPU hog than Dragon’s Dogma 2,” Nick wrote in his Monster Hunter Wilds best settings guide.

Here’s a quick overview:

“I can say right now that frame generation isn’t a must, as one can get a reasonable enough level of performance without using it. However, upscaling certainly is… There is an enormous array of graphics settings one can tweak but Monster Hunter Wilds doesn’t run super fast, even on high-end PC hardware, and many of the settings barely make any difference to the frame rate.

…given how much resolution affects the game’s performance, I strongly suggest using upscaling at all times, unless you happen to have a Ryzen 7 9800X3D paired with an RTX 4090 or 5090. With upscaling and where possible, frame generation, Monster Hunter Wilds does run pretty well but the fact that these graphics features are required for decent performance won’t be pleasing to many a PC gamer.”

For a budget PC, running hardware comparable to an RTX 3060 Ti and a Ryzen 7 5700X3D, we recommend the settings outlined here for smoother performance around 90 frames per second (with Frame Generation enabled). Note that on some of our systems Frame Generation has caused issues with crashing, however, so if you run into the same problem you may have to disable it until a patch arrives.

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What’s the best Monster Hunter monster design?

Capcom’s designed more than 250 monsters(!!) for the series over 20 years, with many of its creatures returning game after game with updated designs or new moves. That legacy means longtime fans may well have a favorite monster that they’ve been fighting for literal decades.

I didn’t get into Monster Hunter until the series arrived on PC with World, so my list of favorites skews newer. Here are the beasties with my favorite designs, or that are my favorite to fight:

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Monster Hunter’s oldest (and newest) weapons are…

In 2004, Capcom established the core of the Monster Hunter arsenal which remains to this day:

• Great Sword
• Hammer
• Lance
• Sword and Shield
• Dual Blades
• Light Bowgun
• Heavy Bowgun

Those weapons have unsurprisingly evolved quite a bit over the years, and seven more weapons have made their way into the series and stayed there ever since. Only a few others have been exclusive to particular sequels or spin-offs.

Now what about new weapons? The youngest monster-skinners are the Insect Glaive and Charge Blade, which were introduced in Monster Hunter 4 in 2013. Will we ever see a 15th join the roster? According to Capcom, it’s a topic of heavy internal discussion, but they’ve given themselves a hard act to follow.

Can you guess Monster Hunter’s longest-serving weapons?

Without looking it up, which of Monster Hunter Wilds’ 14 weapons do you think debuted in the original PlayStation 2 game released in 2004?

I’ll give you a hint: There were seven weapons in the original, and two of them were ranged.

Answers in the next post!

Life’s different without a personal cat chef

Wilds makes some interesting (and overall good!) changes to cooking: It’s quicker and more convenient than ever, letting you whip up a meal while you’re out in the world looking for your next prey. The new ingredient system also makes you think a bit more about what items you’re using to get specific buffs, and when.

But as Morgan wrote about this week, having to cook his own meals left a Meowscular Chef-shaped hole in his heart:

“The magic of the Meowscular Chef was the ritual: He was the last stop before starting a quest, dutifully feeding his hunters like a parent waiting by the front door with a lunchbox. The solo cooking of Wilds is practical, convenient, and serves Wilds’ new sandbox approach to hunting. But it’s not warm, fun, or social.”

The first big Monster Hunter Wilds update is coming in early April, with harder monsters

Capcom has clearly noticed people debating whether Wilds is too easy, because today’s announcement that the first title update is coming in early April included this tidbit:

“A New Level of Challenge! Prepare your gear, and resolve, hunters! TU1 will bring with it a monster of formidable strength at a level above Tempered! Another challenging monster will also await you!”

As we noted on our Monster Hunter Wilds roadmap, Capcom had already promised to deliver the new monster Mitzutsune in the first free update. Could the wording above mean there’s another new monster on the way, too, or should we just expect a powered-up version of one of the existing Wilds fights? Sounds like it’ll be a punishing beast, whatever it is.

If you’re on an RTX card, time to update your drivers

Would you look at that: Nvidia released a new Game Ready driver today, and called out Monster Hunter Wilds launching with “DLSS Frame Generation, DLSS Super Resolution, and ray-traced reflections.” Unfortunately we don’t get any details on whether this driver release includes any optimizations or fixes specific to Wilds, but you’re probably better off installing it than not.

If you wait until after launch to update drivers you’ll end up sitting through shader recompilation all over again, and those are precious minutes you could spend hunting instead.

Our Monster Hunter Wilds review: ‘Best in class monster combat makes up for a wilderness that’s a touch too streamlined’

Capcom’s latest makes some big changes from its predecessors—and most of them pay off, as reviewer Lincoln Carpenter dives into in loads of detail in his 85% Monster Hunter Wilds review. With a decade of experience with the series under his belt, Lincoln came into Wilds ready to feel out how it’s evolved from past games. Here’s the topline takeaway:

“If there’s a word for Wilds, it’s streamlined. Sword fighting with tyrannosaurs and stitching their bits into belts is no longer chopped up between quest-sized chunks. Following a more straightforward, cinematic story, Wilds gives way to a seamless wilderness of rotating seasons and roaming beasts, where any hunting prep can be done in the moment and on the fly. It can feel like a wonder, but it’s not a wonder without a cost. In providing as much monster hunting as possible, Wilds has given up some of Monster Hunter’s charm.

But god, it feels good to fight those lizards. Throughout my almost 70 hours with Wilds, I could feel the 20 years of iteration behind its combat design. Hunting, as a rule, is a well fed occupation, but the latest round of tinkering with Monster Hunter’s 14 weapon types is a feast for every style of wyvern-slayer. Next to the flashy new attacks, fundamental bow and bowgun revisions, and Focus Strike finishers, there’s a subtler artistry in design here that’s easy to overlook. Small, considered tweaks—like new windows for adjusting your footing at the tail end of attack animations—make Wilds the smoothest Monster Hunter fighting has ever felt without sacrificing its meaty texture.”

The rest of our review breaks down where Wilds’ streamlining helps and hinders it, the impressive strides Capcom’s made in its storytelling, and what we make of the new environmental systems. Lincoln couldn’t tear himself away from Monster Hunter over the last couple weeks—except when the game forced him to take a break by crashing, an issue he encountered disappointingly often (seemingly due to DLSS Multi Frame Generation). Fortunately for other members of the team crashes were much less common, and disabling Frame Gen seemed to clear up his issue.

*taps mic* Is this thing on?

As I write this we’re exactly nine hours away from Monster Hunter Wilds’ release time on PC. A few lucky console players in futuristic timezones like “New Zealand”—questionably a real place—are already playing while the rest of us stare at Steam waiting for that beautiful green Play button to light up.

As consolation, I offer up a picture of some Palicos. And meat.