News about Monster Hunter Wilds’ low sales is a heartbreaking sight. As a huge fan of the series, seeing it underperform a few months after its release does not bode well for the series’ future, especially when the big DLC is coming soon.
Obviously, the technical issues are one of the causes for this major fallout of trust from its playerbase. To this day, Monster Hunter Wilds’ optimization is far from ideal, especially for players on mid-range PCs. It’s as if Capcom has stretched the RE Engine too thin, and it could no longer handle the Wilds’ massive technological demands. We’ve talked about this issue in a previous piece, where we debated whether moving to the RE Engine was a great idea.
Optimization is one thing, but there’s one other important factor that severely hurts Wilds’ performance: going open world. Question now is, was open-world the best decision for Monster Hunter Wilds? Or did it give more harm than good?
Personally, shifting the Monster Hunter formula from linear biomes to an open-world game wasn’t the best idea. After spending almost 200 hours in Wilds, I’ve noticed that there was clearly no need for Capcom to implement an open-world Monster Hunter.
The open-world aspect doesn’t even make sense at all. You get these interconnected biomes where the Windward Plains lead to the Scarlet Forest and so on and so forth, but none of that even matters as your Hunter can just fast-travel. It’s as if Capcom’s aggressive accessibility to Monster Hunter Wilds removed the need for immersion and exploration, as players would just rather get to the objective and fast travel.
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An Open-World Monster Hunter game CAN work, but it has to emphasize exploration first. Part of why it doesn’t really click well in Wilds is that everything is handed to us on a silver platter. No more checking for monster fluids on the ground (like World) and throwing paintballs at monsters to mark them on the map; your target is immediately shown on the map, leaving no room for careful thinking.
Wilds just needed to have a select number of biomes similar to what they did with Monster Hunter Rise and Sunbreak, not some grand connected network of separate biomes that add nothing to its immersion. Even its dynamic weather system isn’t the best, as it provides zero risk to Hunters.
Previous Monster Hunter titles have had linear levels to which I love. You still have time to admire the sights as you search for traces of the monster you’re hunting. As an OG Freedom Unite player, the linear levels worked well, and it was weird how Capcom doubled down with open-world in Wilds, when they knew the RE Engine just couldn’t keep up. (See: Dragon's Dogma II)
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Monster Hunter Wilds’ open world just isn’t worth it, and Capcom sacrificing performance for ambitious exploration clearly didn’t work. It felt like an afterthought with no bearing on the real game; as a result, it might be the culprit behind its rocky performance.
Should Capcom start working on the next Monster Hunter game or its DLC, they’d need to realize that its open-world features aren’t that revolutionary. Taking a step back and going for linear biomes might be the real sweet spot they’ve been looking for, and it might save the game’s performance issues.
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