Monster Hunter Wilds is presently under review and is getting tremendously harsh criticism on Steam, some of which are less justified than others. Plagued with criticism for being poorly optimized for PCs, the justification for it being too easy at endgame content was more subjective than anything else. After obliterating all records during sales in launch, it has now dipped below an almost seventh-year-old Monster Hunter World in terms of player count.
The fall-out is super real and dirtier. The atmosphere on Steam is just one steeped in reviews about crashing, drastic drops in framerates, and just horrible stutters-even when trying on high-end machines. One of these players, Scoriox, said: “It’s really frustrating that the game cannot run smoothly on devices like the Steam Deck, while the Deck does fine with titles much more demanding on it.” It is not just the issue of performance: at least amongst veteran hunters, a near-unanimous opinion consists of the fact that Wilds’ endgame content is horribly scant, throwing some back into Monster Hunter World for a real challenge.
Now, keep in mind that this is not the first time a Monster Hunter game got such backlash. LilimVixen reminded everyone that back in the day, those very complaints were said against World: the base game was too easy and the endgame loop repetitive. The catch here is that Capcom fixed those issues in World with updates and expansions like Iceborne that brought tons of depth and difficulty to the game. Now, will Wilds get treated the same, or are players going to be left to wait for a major DLC to finally throw them the challenge they deserve?
Some, like Tiamantus, outright call Wilds the “betrayal” of the series’ identity, equating an easy Monster Hunter to an easy Souls game. Others, like Genevieve Vavance, consider the asinine exaggeration of those complaints and jokingly argue that players should not expect the game to be hard, especially when they manage to grind for 35+ hours per week in real-life. Simp King Ken argued that every base Monster Hunter is easy at first and the hard stuff lessens its topics with post-launch updates.
Capcom said they knew of the problems and were going to patch them, but slow patch releases only fueled the raging discontent. There is now a growing conjecture among players if this happens to be a Capcom-wide issue concerning their PC ports, especially after Dragon’s Dogma 2 was confronted with similar troubles. Still, Wilds finds itself well defended by the generation of players who find more fun and joy in its laid-back playtime.
So where do we stand now? Monster Hunter Wilds is very much a hit on the sales front but a sour one on the reception front. Some love it while some downright hate it, and two-thousand of them are waiting for Capcom to fix the glitches. It remains doubtful whether Wilds is the next Worlds-style comeback, but one thing is for sure: the Monster Hunter community will always go out of their way to give their take on the matter—and truthfully, they shouldn’t even be ashamed for it. It’s practically a blessing to be able to say what’s not really politically correct about this franchise.
