Following on from the major success of the previous two titles in the series it's no surprise that Monster Hunter Wilds has achieved staggering sales numbers in its first three days, but one major issue has deflated the excitement for many players on PC especially.
With games becoming bigger than ever with increasingly demanding graphics, it's only natural that achieving high framerates becomes more and more challenging every single year.
Players on PC are used to dropping hundreds if not thousands of dollars every couple of years on the latest graphics card and CPU releases to ensure that they're getting the most out of their games, but sometimes even the best gear can't save you from a poorly optimized release.
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This is once again observed following the launch of Capcom's Monster Hunter Wilds, which has been the target of significant ire despite receiving glowing reviews and record-breaking sales figures.
Having a look at SteamDB - a database that tracks concurrent player counts on Valve's Steam launcher - we're able to see that Monster Hunter Wilds quickly soared up the rankings, achieving an all time peak of 1,384,608 players the day after release.
This makes it the fifth highest player count peak ever on Steam, beating other huge single player games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring by quite a considerable margin.
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On top of this, Capcom recently reported that the game has sold over 8,000,000 copies in its first three days alone, which amounts to roughly $570,000,000 (based on $70 per purchase) and is the fastest time to reach this figure in the company's history, as reported by Push Square.
Despite this, the game currently only has a 53.75% review score on Steam, recording 50,303 negative reviews alongside 58,470 positive ones, earning it the 'Mixed' status.
Some point to the 'poor' multiplayer implementation - a key feature for many that they've been let down by - but by far the biggest cause of frustration comes from the bad performance and optimization that many are experiencing.
"You probably should have hashed out the performance and game-breaking bugs before releasing a full priced game," outlines one of the 'most helpful' reviews on Steam right now, with another adding: "Fix the performance issues. No excuse for this unfinished mess on release, especially if you're charging $70 for it. My machine is 4 times what a PS5 is and a PS5 at least runs it consistently."
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Similar sentiments have been echoed on the game's dedicated subreddit, with a performance megathread compiling countless complaints alongside a long list of mods that players can install to potentially aid their framerate woes.
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"I am losing my goddamn mind with this game, seeing my XTX hit 54-60 fps in combat (WITH MOST SETTINGS AT LOW) makes me want to just quit this game all together," writes one frustrated player, adding that "my excitement went down the drain."
Others have expressed their disappointment at the developer's radio silence, as one comment illustrates: "To me the saddest part of all of this is that Capcom did not address this issue yet. At least some sort of acknowledgement at this point of Capcom's side would have been nice, but as far as I can tell, this hasn't been the case."
Any experienced Monster Hunter fans will have likely predicted the current situation with ease though, as the exact same thing happened when World launched on PC back in August 2018.
It did eventually get fixed, and performance especially improved as more powerful hardware became available to players, but many longtime fans have had to go through the same pain for a second time now and that's not ideal.