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As a card-carrying MonHun sufferer, it gives me no joy to say this: the Monster Hunter Wilds beta doesn’t bode well for a soft launch.

Considering it’s attractive hundreds of thousands of playersthe beta is certainly getting a lot of attention. Unfortunately, this attention has not been entirely positive. Players aren’t having the greatest time once they enter the Forbidden Lands for their demo hunts: hunters have reported widespread performance issues, while seemingly buggy LOD (level of detail) transitions leave their games populated with horrible lo-poly NPCs. and monster models that look like they came straight out of a PS1 game.

Currently, the first page of the Monster Hunter subreddit is filled with players sharing the bizarre scenes produced by the beta’s graphical glitches. In a video from hunt for introductory demosthe giant toad monster Tetsucabra appears as an amorphous husk with no identifiable features and no limbs. In another, a Rey Dau sketched by LOD rushes in looking like a cliff runner from Morrowind.

Elsewhere on Reddit, in a discussion thread discuss beta player countThe discussion quickly shifted as users from a wide range of PCs shared their experiences with the beta’s uneven performance. “I’m on a Ryzen 5 5600/RTX 3060, decent mid-range hardware, and I barely hit 30 FPS most of the time without DLSS on medium settings,” an editor said. “With this I can reach 50-60 but the world seems to be covered in Vaseline, it’s not a good compromise!”

“There definitely seems to be a CPU bottleneck or something framerate-wise in town,” said another user running an AMD Ryzen 5800X and an Nvidia RTX 3080, “because I found that changing the graphics settings made very little difference (I only gained 10fps by going from High/Ultra to Low). “

While I’ve never seen monsters transform into polygonal frankensteins, I’ve encountered my own performance issues with the Wilds beta. In addition to low frame rates and frequent LOD pop-ins, the game has constant blurry ghosting, even when I turned off any type of scaling. I can tinker with things until it’s playable enough to hunt a monster, but I wouldn’t call that a pleasant level of performance.

As much as I would like to say otherwise, this is not a complete surprise. After Dragon’s Dogma 2 generated its share of performance issues Earlier this year, Capcom failed to inspire confidence by revealing that the Monster Hunter Wilds System Specifications were only targeting 1080p/60fps with medium settings and frame generation enabled. Dragon’s Dogma 2 in particular I received a patch in Septembersix months after its release, to improve “frame rates in areas with a lot of NPCs, such as city centers” which were apparently suffering from “CPU overload”. Both games run on Capcom’s in-house RE Engine.

Capcom seems aware of the beta’s problems. This morning, the official Monster Hunter account on tweeted that the full game “is already in a more improved state compared to the beta test”. Capcom also provided a troubleshooting guide for the beta, with your standard suggestions for updating your GPU drivers and, let’s see here, making sure your Windows Media Player codecs are up to date? Can’t hurt, I guess. (Unless it does.)

I’d like to know what, specifically, is already “in a more enhanced state”, but we probably won’t know until Monster Hunter Wilds fully launches on February 28. Hopefully Capcom can fit in a good amount of optimization work in the next four months. Until then, I’m going to calculate how many PC upgrades I’m willing to invest in sword fighting with dinosaurs.