2d ago

Thoughts on the Monster Hunter Wilds open beta

It was very good. The seikret riding mechanics are about as good as can be hoped for, the focus/wound system feels better than the clutch claw while being more grounded than Rise's gimmick, and the map feels more vibrant and alive than even MHWorld's maps instead of just being a few little arenas like in Rise.

The performance was ok for me, but it was maxing out both my CPU and GPU and I got an irrecoverable hard GPU crash once which required a hard reboot and made me sit through it compiling shaders for ten minutes again. It does not look nearly visually good enough for how demanding it is, although it does look pretty good; it's like a slightly higher definition MHWorld without the shitty TAA and overly aggressive bloom. The framegen it wanted to run by default was both unnecessary and created awful ghosting in a way I've never seen anything do before.

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Bad:
It kinda looks like ass? Maybe it's the level in the beta but everything looks so gray and murky. World looks better in some ways. The sandy dunes part of the desert part looks nice though.
Runs like ass. I just built a pretty bougie PC and even at triple digit frame rates, it has a lot of hiccups and stutters. CPU was at 60%, so I dunno what's going on here.
The tutorial mission was bad. 20 minutes to teach basic moves and doesn't do a good job at it.
Good:
I dig the changes of every weapon I've checked. Hunting Horn feels way more rhythm-based and techy, bow has sick moves and maneuverability, greatsword got better mobility to make bonking easier.
The third monster that I forgot the name of was tough and fun to fight

They changed the charge blade and I keep accidentally putting the electricity juice straight into the shield instead of the axe, so the game is trash now
- Lmao I had the same problem, but it had been long enough since I last played MHWorld that I wasn't sure if it had been changed up or if I just couldn't remember how to do it right.

based on dragons dogma 2, i think this game has bad vibes and its gonna not be good. Though, i haven't really enjoyed a MH since MH tri
- If you ever want to play Tri on the private servers or 3U on PabloCitra/Azahar let me know. That's my favorite gen too and I'd be glad to revisit it

Enjoying the changes to greatsword but it requires more skill than I currently possess to do offset attacks.

I'm very bummed that I won't be able to play Wilds without a massive overhaul of my system, or buying a console. This will be the first monster hunter game I have missed since 3U launched. the graphical arms race has left me in the dust

What hardware do you have and what settings were you running at? Curious how brutal it's going to be for me.
- A ryzen 5 7600 and an RX 6800. I didn't mess with the settings too much and just let it default them to medium, but I turned off motion blur, framegen, and bloom and turned up texture resolution, upscaling quality, and fur/hair quality without any issues. Except the one crash, which may have been caused by adrenalin wanting to force enable its own extra bullshit and me not thinking to check and turn that off until afterwards.
  Apparently there's already further performance patches in the main fork that have been added to the benchmark tool, but which weren't in the open beta fork, so you could try the benchmark from the store page. There's another open beta in a few days so you could try it then: they've apparently got it set to just autoaccept beta requests and it doesn't require owning the game to try. It is apparently not going to be patched to have the performance fixes, though.
  
  Thanks for the thorough report. I'll try and play the next beta for a bit. I have a 7800X3D and 7800XT so it should be slightly better for me but who knows with modern "optimization".

Light bowgun no longer has a melee action. I am devastated.
Performance was as expected. It’s a demanding game.
The new mount is cool, I think it’s great with it auto tracking to the target.
Being able to swap to a completely different weapon mid fight is super cool though.
- Friend of ours was actively messing around with graphic settings and found a Porygon

Can you still zip around on wires like in Rise or did they take that away?
- That's Rise only. This is back to MHWorld style movement, except with the mount systems from both MHWorld and Rise merged into the seikrets, which can autopath like in World or be manually ridden like in Rise and which kind of circle around the edge of the fight to be ready to let you call them at any point.

14 comments