Monster Hunter Wilds beta pulls in nearly half a million concurrent Steam players, some of which are being turned into PS1-style low-poly blobs

Monster Hunter Wilds' open beta has been live on PC for less than eight hours, but it's already hit an appropriately monstrous number of concurrent players, even if a particularly troublesome graphical bug is stealing the spotlight online.

While the action RPG's open beta kicked off for PS Plus subscribers on PS5 earlier this week, over the last few hours, it finally became available for players on Xbox Series X|S and PC too. It was already obvious that it was going to be popular – yesterday, before it was even possible to play, around 23,000 concurrent users had the game open on PC, presumably just staring hungrily at the title screen. However, now that it's possible to do a fair bit more than that, that peak player count has shot up massively, and according to SteamDB, now stands at 463,798 – a record set seven hours ago, around an hour after it went (properly) live. There's a good chance that number will rise even more over the weekend, too, given that for many timezones, that record was set overnight. 

Needless to say, that's a huge win for Capcom, but not everything has been smooth sailing. The likes of Reddit and Twitter are currently full of screenshots and clips showing both people and monsters transformed into low-poly blobs that stick out like sore thumbs compared to the usual beautiful visuals – they almost look like they could belong in a PS1 game. The huge frog-like monster Chatacabra doesn't look quite as intimidating when it's a barely-recognizable green and brown lump with a flailing tongue, and the models of the humans sometimes appear as borderline nightmare fuel with what look like flattened faces and tightly shut eyes. You can check out some of the horrors below.

Peak graphics, puts world to shame from r/MHWilds

Gemma The Chosen One from r/MHWilds

LMAO what am I even fighting?? from r/MHWilds

Alas, for anyone experiencing this, there doesn't seem to be an obvious fix available right now. One of the Reddit users above, Qettt, notes: "Unfortunately, nothing I do actually affects the broken textures. Verifying files, reinstalling game, recompiling shaders, nothing really worked. The textures were partially fixed when I turned up all the model/mesh/graphic settings to high, but character models (aside from Gemma) were still missing limbs or were still generally broken." They later add that "reinstalling drivers temporarily fixed the issue," but after restarting the game, "everything broke again."

Hopefully, whatever's causing this will be ironed out by the end of the beta period. Even if not, at least it's been flagged now rather than at the action RPG's actual launch. 

After 500 hours in Monster Hunter World, the Monster Hunter Wilds beta feels like a new pair of shoes: fresh and stylish, but a little uncomfortable.