Things are not looking good for Monster Hunter Wilds, especially on PC.
After a successful few months of selling over 10 million copies, garnering over a million concurrent Steam players, and receiving critical acclaim (including a 4/5 star review from us at Windows Central), people have recently started turning on Capcom's latest entry in the vaunted Monster Hunter series.
According to the game's Steam page, fans have been review-bombing Monster Hunter Wilds to the point where its rating is now at "Overwhelmingly Negative".
Criticisms from fans range from Monster Hunter Wild's lack of substantial end-game content compared to previous Monster Hunter titles, the series' vaunted challenge being aggressively dumbed down due to incongruent and overly streamlined mechanics, a brief and forgettable story campaign — and, most notably, its subpar performance on PC.
Fans have stated that Monster Hunter Wilds' optimization on PC remains poor after several months, even when they run the game with the best PC graphics on the market. Verified reviews decry the game's frame rate, constant stuttering, numerous graphical glitches, gameplay bugs, atop crash events.
As a result, Monster Hunter Wilds' one million-plus concurrent Steam player base, has gradually dropped to below that of the far-older Monster Hunter: World.
Indeed, fans have even started returning to playing Monster Hunter: World seeking the challenge and content breadth Wilds has yet to offer. As of writing, it has twice the amount of concurrent players that Monster Hunter Wilds has right now, despite Monster Hunter: World being over seven years old and no longer receiving updates from Capcom.
Monster Hunter games are generally known for their "long tail," as in strong post-launch content and endgame mechanics coalesce to keep the game fresh for elongated periods of time. Monster Hunter Wilds' endgame is vanishingly brief, given that the game's difficulty curve eliminated the necessity to grind gear, as monster battles were too easy to require any learning or counter play.
Will Monster Hunter Wilds be able to win back the fans' favor?
I'm somewhat torn over this situation. On the one hand, nobody wants to see a game fail to live up to expectations and be reviled by the public when the developers have worked long and hard on it. On the other hand, I feel vindicated knowing that more are starting to realize Monster Hunter Wilds' deep flaws. We called out most of its issues and lack of real danger months ago.
Now, granted, Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise suffered similar fan backlash when their base games first launched before being improved by Title Updates and DLC expansions. However, these issues are taken to a detrimental extreme in Monster Hunter Wilds, especially on PC, thanks to the game's subpar performance, which has yet to be addressed in the first Title Update or the Akuma update.
Hopefully, future Title Updates (like the Lagiacrus Title Update launching at the end of June 2025) will be able to win back the fans by adding more significant endgame content that will keep players coming back for more and fixing the PC version's performance issues.
The disruption of Monster Hunter Wilds' gameplay ecosystem could lead to a permanent abandonment from some long-time fans, whose expectations simply haven't been met with Wilds — so far.
Monster Hunter Wilds is available for purchase on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam.
