Monster Hunter Wilds Releases to Mixed Reviews — What Are Gamers Saying?

Monster Hunter Wilds has been one of the most-anticipated titles of the year, and with CAPCOM finally unleashing the Forgotten Lands onto players, it has become time to jump into the franchise once again. As a large number of eager players joined the fray, one thing became instantly evident: the reception, though clearly strong in terms of sales and revenue, wasn't as great in the ballpark of gamer sentiment.

Monster Hunter Wilds received a glowing critic reception — even our review highly recommended in favour of it. Yet, despite this, it seems like the title has received middling reviews on Steam's storefront, where it is currently sitting at 52% positive ratings with more than two dozen user scores. Why?

The greatest complaint that Monster Hunter Wilds is receiving so far is the lack of optimisation, which will see users struggle to run the game at higher qualities — even with high-end PCs. The overall design and aesthetic of the latest release are beautiful, but with pop-in textures and a mandatory requirement for an SSD, many gamers have been disgruntled with the overall performance of the game.

The latest Steam Hardware Survey states the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card is the most common card among gamers, boasting 5.06% of users slotting their gaming PCs with it. The following two most famous cards sit as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, each with 4.46% of users utilising it respectively (though, we can't help but wonder if this is a glitch).

In contrast to the Minimum System Requirements, this should be more than enough for most to enjoy the game, as the graphics card required for 30 FPS under the "Lowest" graphics setting is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 with 6GB of VRAM and an Intel Core i5-10400. When looking at the Recommended settings, however, a new picture starts getting painted, as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 is recommended for 60FPS under the "Medium" graphics settings.

This is where users take complaints with the title, as the poor optimisation has scared off a fair few players with weaker devices and — perhaps most significantly of all — Steam Deck users. Monster Hunter Wilds prompts users to use frame generation for its open-world experience on launch, and without any capability to do so, alongside the weaker specs, Steam Deck users were left more than wanting.

As it stands, however, despite the tumultuous Steam rating, there are still a vast majority of players who are still playing the experience, which bodes well for CAPCOM's Monster Hunter release of 2025. If you want to pick up Monster Hunter Wilds, you can do so through the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows PC via Steam for £59.99.