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The latest Monster Hunter Wilds patch is a perfect distillation of everything people like and dislike about the game, with its community appearing split between different fans pushing for different visions.
The patch added yet another difficulty tier, a new endgame grind in the form of talismans with random skills, and a raft of weapon balance changes (that I was a big fan of as a lance main). It is, by and large, good stuff, though we're still severely lacking in increasingly overdue performance improvements, especially on PC.
Because Monster Hunter Rise started as a Nintendo Switch exclusive, Monster Hunter Wilds marks the first time since Monster Hunter World – which dramatically grew the series' audience – that a new mainline game in the series has launched on almost all major platforms (Nintendo is excluded). It's the most accessible, modern Monster Hunter yet, and 10 million people bought it in a month. We see debates about difficulty, style, and variety with every new Monster Hunter game, but those discussions have seemed especially fierce with Wilds.
We're seeing the effects of audience expansion, with different player demands colliding and Capcom struggling to please both sides in patch after patch. If you ask how hard the game should be, how long hunts should take, and where difficulty should come from, you'll get very different answers depending on who you ask.
Capcom seems desperate to add new content to sustain the game's player base until the inevitable Master Rank DLC arrives, as evidenced by the fact that the latest update moved up several features and changes previously planned for a separate, future patch.
The new difficulty tier, for instance, answers requests for more of a challenge. Some people are happy to feel threatened by monsters again, but other people are quickly getting tired of being killed in one or two hits by monsters they previously didn't have much, or nearly as much, trouble with.
This ever-growing tower of difficulty reveals some inelegance in Wilds' post-launch updates. We now have 9-star versions of Tempered monsters outdoing Arch-Tempered variants meant to be special, end-all name-takers. Similarly, is a grade-5, 8-star monster more dangerous than a grade-3, 9-star?
Only a small selection of monsters have 8-star and 9-star versions, and which monsters are available to hunt at any given time is unpredictable – this funnels players into a small pool of hunts that neglect some of Wilds' best original creatures. The strongest monsters are getting stronger, but Capcom seems unable or unwilling to quickly bring a broader variety of monsters and gear up to the level of the current endgame standard, landing the game in a sort of purgatorial, pseudo-Master Rank.
I don't think any previous Monster Hunter game has made such dramatic difficulty leaps within six months of launch, so it sometimes feel like Wilds is a ship being pushed around by waves of community demands.
In another example, the return of random talismans answered cries for more buildcrafting freedom under the new split armor and weapon skills, but it's also torqued the power level of mixed armor sets to 11, devouring would-be design space for future gear and necessitating stronger monsters that can keep up with players.
You also want to hunt the strongest monsters to get the best of these talismans, putting players back on a wheel that sees half their health bar disappear in two frames. One path here is making those monsters so dangerous, you're strongly encouraged to sacrifice some offensive skills in favor of defensive ones. But then we're back to the difficulty debate.
When Monster Hunter Wilds was released – with seamless food buffs and quest joining, readily obtainable rare drops, a full-throated narrative, no guild multiplayer hub (added later), new Focus Mode attacks, and a combat system infused with reactive Offset attacks – many longtime series fans wondered if Capcom had sanded off too much of the friction and charm that gave the series its own identity.
In almost every update since, Capcom has seemingly sought to add some of that friction back in. But this new patch added a lot of it, forcing players to take on brutal monsters if they want to get the very best randomly rolled gear. Some people love the direction Wilds is headed, others find it off-putting, and others still can't play it at all, because it reduces their PC to ashes.
I've been monitoring Monster Hunter discussions across forums, videos, and social media for months, and this tug-of-war feels eternal. Make this harder, make this easier, make this take longer, make this more rewarding. This patch brought it to a boil, so I wanted to dive in.
The backdrop to all this is the unassailable fact that Wilds is a critical darling (our Monster Hunter Wilds review gave it high marks) and became Capcom's fastest-selling game ever. But based on sharply declining sales, it does seem that the optics on the game, perhaps extending beyond its busted PC port, have had an impact.
My mind goes to the devs championing sicko games made for niche communities, trusting that those games can draw outsiders in if they are good enough. Looking at all the back-and-forth in Wilds' post-launch updates, I do wonder if Capcom has perhaps spent too much energy trying to build a game for everyone.
