Capcom’s new game is a bit ahead of the game in terms of monetization, but let’s take Monster Hunter Wilds one step at a time.

We’ve already written about how Monster Hunter Wilds performs poorly on consoles (even the PlayStation 5 Pro!) and PC. Digital Foundry has now released their PC analysis. After a good first impression, reality set in: poor image quality, low quality textures – presumably due to texture compression errors – and below-average performance. The site believes that the performance issues are caused by the way the game streams data to the GPU, as frame timing is very poor on low- and mid-end graphics cards when the camera is panned quickly, while frame timing remains decent when the camera is not panned or panned slowly.

This problem is also present on more powerful GPUs, but is less noticeable. Since the poor texture quality persists, Digital Foundry says that Monster Hunter Wilds’ problems are not due to VRAM usage, although it’s possible that the game is streaming data there and compressing textures unnecessarily aggressively. The problem is that it persists even on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080. In the second video below, you can see that one of the most powerful GPUs can’t reach 60 FPS at 4K resolution on the highest settings. And this is shocking because a game using the RE engine is not very visually stunning.

Monster Hunter Wilds also has a character editor. The problem is that it is mostly locked behind a microtransaction. You can edit your character and Palico once for free with a token provided by Capcom, but after that you’ll have to pay every time you want to change the look of your character. The Monster Hunter Wilds – Character Edit: Three-Voucher Pack is now available in digital stores for $6, and that’s what you need to change the look. If we also change the Palico, the pack is $10.

However, these microtransactions were not present during the test period. As always, they were added after the fact, after the press published their reviews, which is not very fair…

Source: WCCFTech