Monster Hunter Wilds is off to an amazing start, at least in terms of Steam numbers. CAPCOM's latest entry in the monster hunting franchise has literally crushed the player concurrency peaks registered by the two previous (and already highly successful) entries, Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise, which stopped at 334K and 231K concurrent users, respectively.
Monster Hunter Wilds has just reached 1.38 million concurrent users, over a million more than Monster Hunter World, which is enough to place it in Steam's all-time Top 5, behind only PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, Black Myth: Wukong, Palworld, and Counter-Strike 2, and just ahead of the free-to-play action RPG Lost Ark. A new concurrency peak may well be registered later today, although it's unlikely it'd be enough to surpass Counter-Strike 2's record of 1.8 million concurrent players.
Having said that, user reception on Steam is far from optimal. The average user review score is just 54%, a far cry from the 89% average score of Monster Hunter World and the 82% average score of Monster Hunter Rise. Wccftech's review touched upon the reasons for this: the low challenge level and poor PC performance.
What most players are never going to get used to is performance, at least on PC. Just as the system requirements and the benchmark tool suggested, performance is really all over the place, reaching an acceptable level of smoothness only with Frame Generation. [...] In the heat of the hunt, I did not notice the frame rate drops too often, but watching the recording, in reality, it was very choppy instead. So, if you don't have a top-of-the-line machine, you may have to drop most settings and resolution to hit 60 FPS, which is the bare minimum for a game like this. Following the game and Dragon's Dogma 2, it's quite clear how the RE Engine may not have all it takes to handle open-world experiences properly.
Both areas can definitely be worked on post-launch by the developers, which could lead to a drastic increase in the game's average user score on Steam. However, if Dragon's Dogma 2 is any indication, that game's equally poor performance did not significantly improve post-release. It seems like the developers may still have work to be done at an engine level to make sure the RE Engine runs well in open world games like Monster Hunter Wilds.
In the meantime, you can try user-made mods and see if they make a positive difference to your gameplay experience. For instance, Nexus user Darex2094 found improvements in the game's stuttering by replacing the Direct Storage.dll file with the latest version.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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