Going Wild – Monster Hunter Wilds Beta Impressions

Following our time playing Capcom’s Monster Hunter Wilds at NYCC, a public beta was released on all PlayStation, Xbox, and PC platforms for a few days. After playing it for two hours on my Lenovo Gaming Laptop, I came away very excited to play the full release next year despite concerns about the game’s performance.

The Hunt – What Was In the Monster Hunter Wild’s Beta

Playing the Beta for over two hours, I was able to explore most of the initial area, which was a vast desert location filled with low and medium-level monsters to hunt. The beta gives you much freedom after the initial intro section, letting you tackle whatever hunts you want without restriction.

Items, making camps, and other major elements of the Monster Hunter gameplay are fully accessible. In addition, full support for online co-op was available, but I played solo, so cannot comment on how stable that feature was.

In comparison to the New York Comic-Con 2024 demo we had access to, I appreciated having the freedom to go after the monsters I wanted, rather than a guided hunt.

Gameplay Loop of Monster Hunter Wilds

As a newcomer to this franchise, how I approached my two hours with the beta was hunting down whatever got my attention in the case of the Beta, which was the lower-level monsters roaming the open desert.

Using a rifle with two firing options and a bug-staff, which let me extract buffs from monsters, I went on multiple twenty to thirty-minute hunts. Each hunt was a thrilling experience, largely due to how dynamic battles can become.

The monster AI is very reactive to the world around them. From navigating pits of quicksand to even fighting other monsters that get in their way, battles frequently had me narrowly avoiding dangers as much as I was focusing on attacking my target. I loved this, as being lost in the hunt allowed me to slowly pick up on the game’s core mechanics organically.

I went from having zero clue how to attack my target to frequently landing on its back and creating wounds that my bug staff easily ripped through and effortlessly jumping back on my mount to switch to my rifle, getting some hits in from a distance.

Despite picking up on a lot, I feel the game doesn’t explain how to use the camp system, as I had no clue how to make camps during my adventures. Regarding the more in-depth mechanics, the final game hopefully will feature a better tutorial system for newcomers.

Performance Concerns

I played Monster Hunter Wilds on my Lenovo Legon Laptop, which has an AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT, AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX, and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM.

Booting the game up, Monster Hunter Wilds recommended frame generation upon boot up, something I do not recommend if the implementation here reflects the final game. It had an ugly-looking ghosting effect and the input-lag made encounters feel janky. In addition, the default settings made the overall visuals look great, but the performance frequently was well below 60FPS, which is critical for an action title like this.

Thankfully, using the many options in the Beta’s graphics settings, I got 45-60FPS on Medium settings at 1000p and the game felt great to play.

I did not play on Series X, Series S, or PlayStation 5, but the performance seemingly is stable. The cost is lackluster image quality across the board. Hopefully, the game will iron out the performance issues when it launches in 2025.

Capcom responded players pointing out the Beta’s lackluster performance, that the final release will be better. Dragons Dogma 2, another CPU-intensive release on the RE Engine that also powers Monster Hunter Wilds, still has performance woes months after launch. So we shall see if Capcom manages to have stable performance on base consoles and PC.

Closing Thoughts

Despite the performance concerns, I loved my time with the beta and can’t wait for the full release in February 2024. Stay tuned for additional coverage on Monster Hunter Wilds at Lords of Gaming and let us know if you played the Beta!