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After many more hours and a few welcome multiplayer hunts in the PC Monster Hunter Wilds beta, I’m here to stay. my entirely positive impressions of the first beta version of the PS5. The game looks good and I’m not really sure what to do now that the beta is over. In just a few days, Monster Hunter Wilds began to become a part of my life, that comfortable Monster Hunter-shaped addition that was missing from my routine, and now I absolutely can’t wait to play the full game.

That said, some things don’t look so good. Compared to Monster Hunter World and Rise, some details actually look pretty bad. This beta was a fun free sample, but I will be more than disappointed if several elements aren’t noticeably improved by the time Monster Hunter Wilds launches on February 28, 2025. That said, the Monster Hunter betas have been extremely beneficial in the past, so I have no doubt that the final game will be more polished thanks to the beta data. But Capcom explicitly seeks feedbackso if I can’t play Monster Hunter Wilds, I’ll just have to write about it. Here are 11 issues that stood out to me during my 15 hours of beta testing.

Performance, obviously

Let’s get the biggest one out of the way. THE Wild Monster Hunters the beta version didn’t work very well on most PCs. I wasn’t over the moon with the PS5 version either, and I’ve heard horror stories about the Xbox Series S. On PS5, the performance mode was noticeably stained and the graphics mode didn’t have the frequency of ‘images that action a game like this really needs. This is probably the biggest problem facing Wilds right now, but it’s also the one with the most obvious solution: you just need to optimize it better. Easy for me to say! The developers have assured players that the full game is already in better shapeso hopefully the inevitable second beta will look and work much better.

Monsters run away all the time

I lied. This is currently the biggest problem with Wilds. When bosses leave town all the time, it wastes the player’s time, kills the pacing of combat, and throws all the limited-time buffs into a big dumpster. This problem isn’t new to Monster Hunter, but it seems particularly egregious in Wilds, with monsters sometimes changing areas every one or two minutes, and often running hundreds of meters in an instant. This is exaggerated by the length of hunts due to weak beta gear, but if the motivation to get stronger and play better is to reduce exasperating AI monster, something is wrong. I want Capcom to leash these things in one area for at least four or five minutes at a time.

Too many monsters at once

I shouldn’t have to remove droppings multiple times during a single hunt just to tell the unwanted invaders to go away. Multiple large monsters spawn in the same area too often and hang around each other for too long. If I didn’t come here to chase him away, he might end up in the aforementioned big dumpster. It doesn’t even make sense; everything would surely escape the apex predator of an environment. And if another monster wants to interrupt my hunt for Rey Dau, it might at least have the common decency to deal some damage to the thing before I literally tell it to eat shit. Instead they have the nerve to attack Meas if I had just killed 17 of their closest friends and was now wearing their skin. This doesn’t sound like me at all.

Too many buttons at once

More than once, Monster Hunter Wilds reminded me of meme PlayStation 6 controller mockups with 20 buttons and four analog sticks. It seems that Wilds overcomplicates some weapons, or at least maps the controls poorly. Multiple attacks rely on three simultaneous inputs. It’s just plain uncomfortable to hit a triangle and circle while aiming with L2 and the right stick. And keeps with R2, but honestly it wouldn’t be such a big deal if the game’s input buffering didn’t consistently misread commands.

Pocket for bulky items

After item loadouts in World and Rise essentially fixed Monster Hunter’s restocking issues and streamlined the inventory UI, Wilds seems to have returned to tedious, multi-step processes for replenishing your potions and ammunition. What we need is a one or two button solution that populates our inventory with everything we need, preferably coupled with an interface that has no more steps than a blade. charge.

Constant UI disruptions

On a related note, I can’t begin to express how little I care about the notifications that regularly appear on the right side of Wilds. I’ve disabled all possible blurbs and boxes, but they keep coming back like invasive web ads. Did you know your flash bomb was effective? Yes, Capcom, because I saw the monster fall from the sky. Did you know these other monsters are waging a turf war somewhere? No, and why do I have to? What about this environmental update that we’re going to put on the button that opens the map? Can I have my card, please?

The weather changes instantly all the time

Environments update a bit Also frequently, as it happens, and probably too quickly. Dynamic weather is all well and good, but the storm conditions in the beta absolutely diminish visibility and framerate, and it’s blatantly unnatural for an eclipse-like storm to consume the entire desert in two seconds. And then, bam, it’s back to the sun and rainbows a few minutes later. It even makes Georgian weather look tame, and it feels like a classic case of aesthetics conflicting with gameplay.

Uneven level design hurts combat

While we – that’s me – are on the subject, I’d like to prioritize the hunting experience over creating pretty and varied levels. The sand dunes in the beta are the worst offenders, constantly forcing your character to slide and causing monsters to move erratically when going over a hill. In my ideal world, every area in every Monster Hunter game would be a largely flat arena with some minor decorations to spruce it up. This will never happen, and admittedly, it probably shouldn’t because it would get boring, but Wilds covering levels with elements and shapes that completely break movement seems like an unhealthy extreme in itself.

The limp wristed weapon hit the stop

If players take out frame counters to explain why weapons don’t have the same thing punch Plus, there is a problem. Big hits just don’t seem to matter in Wilds, and I miss my juicy critical attacks. I got more satisfaction from cutting the pork loin with a chef’s knife. The lack of hit stopping on meaty hits isn’t made up for by those brilliant one-decimal damage numbers. Pull up the stop sign a little, please. Give me some images of pain. Put some stank above.

Focus mode

Focus Mode, which lets you land wound-destroying special attacks and aim normal attacks with greater precision, actually seems like a healthy addition to Monster Hunter’s combat as a whole, but it makes some weapons downright heavy . How am I supposed to move my character and the crosshair while holding the charge button on my insect glaive? I only have a limited number of figures, Capcom, and this is coming from someone who used a claw grip on a Nintendo 3DS for 500 hours of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. And after another 500 hours in Monster Hunter World, mostly spent on the spear, why does it suddenly seem impossible to land certain attacks without Are you using Focus mode?

Weapon Imbalance

Hello, it’s me who officially abandons my thin disguise and puts on my soapbox to summon my 11 fellow hand throwers. Why does the guard’s perfect counterattack, which absolutely slapped in Monster Hunter Rise and Generations, deal about 20% more damage than a normal hit? This is a travesty, and it cannot continue.

Seriously, it’s not just Lance. Many movement values ​​seem oddly asymmetrical, hurting the competitiveness of some weapons and distorting their playstyle in unfun ways. Sure, you control what buttons you press and what weapons you use, but feeling powerful is fun. This shouldn’t be as bad in the full game when we have access to more weapon and armor skills, but some numbers definitely need to be tweaked. There will always be a worse weapon, but the gap shouldn’t be as big as the Monster Hunter speedrunning community came to believe after the Wilds beta.

Monster Hunter Wilds players are using the beta character creator to recreate their Monster Hunter World hunters, aged for good measure, as well as their real cats.