The second Monster Hunter Wilds beta has begun, and although Arkveld and Gypceros have been added in as new monsters to hunt, this vertical slice of the game doesn't have the technical polish or balance changes that Capcom has cooked up since the first beta. Heck, it's noticeably behind the build we played for our Monster Hunter Wilds hands-on preview last year. Consequently, the same old beta bugs have come up again, but at this point many players are actually happy to see the now-beloved low-poly monsters back to their old hijinks – and the folks making the game are happy you like them.
In the first beta, PC players found that, seemingly due to GPU bottlenecks or loading issues (depending on your rig), monsters and characters in Monster Hunter Wilds would occasionally end up lacking, well, dimensions. In most cases, there'd be missing textures or large details, but severe examples can cough up flailing oblong chimeras that make the Fighting Polygon Team from Super Smash Bros. look certifiably high-def.
These monstrosities were quickly nicknamed origami monsters and even spawned their own fanart, not to mention mods for other Monster Hunter games deliberately recreating the blocky look. This kind of issue wouldn't be nearly as funny in the full game, but some players have expressed hopes to see event quests in Wilds commemorating the beta's iconic origami mons.
Now seemed like a good time to share a fun anecdote from a previous exchange I had with Monster Hunter producer Ryozo Tsujimoto, Wilds art and executive director Kaname Fujioka, and Wilds director Yuya Tokuda. In a group interview, I asked if they'd seen all the players having fun with origami monster memes and mods, and how it feels to see the beta's brokenness celebrated in this way. I compared the low-poly beasts to the original PS2 Monster Hunter – if anything, they're much more retro – and as the question was relayed in Japanese by our interpreter, the group fell into laughter cut with just the tiniest bit of the resignation that's born from technical issues.
"They were aware of how people were experiencing some of the low polygons and having their fun with it," our interpreter explained, focusing on Fujioka's response to begin with. "It was a nice thing to see that people were enjoying it in a way that they were having fun with it."
Relaying Tsujimoto's response, the interpreter continued: "But obviously we would recommend people do play and get the full experience on the PC with the recommended PC specs that we have stated out there. Obviously, when you play on the PC, the specs vary widely depending on what kind of environment you have, so our suggestion is for people to please play on the recommended specs to get the full experience. But it's nice to know that some people are enjoying or having fun with Monster Hunter Wilds."
As it happens, those PC specs have been reduced slightly after some optimization on Capcom's end. Monster Hunter Wilds isn't a lightweight game by any means, and in early performance tests using the new benchmark tool, it seems to be CPU-limited just like Monster Hunter World was, but running it is now a slightly less daunting task. The PC performance of the full game remains to be seen, however. Again, don't let the outdated beta build throw you off, but don't put too much stock in the benchmark tool's limited scenarios either.
Monster Hunter Wilds saved some big surprises for the second beta: "online single player," Gore Magala, a new monster, and photo mode.
