Monster Hunter Wilds Discussion thread. It's out NOW!

[Chazore]

Kyuu said:

Your idea isn't dumb at all, it's forward thinking and probably beneficial for Capcom in the long run. Building a new engine or thoroughly upgrading/repurposing an existing one is a great idea if you're going to use it for multiple future games. Not exactly a like for like comparison, but this takes me back to when some Nintendo fans kept trying to spin any positive Monster Hunter World news into negatives, with absurd arguments like "but how much did it cost to make?" as if they wanted the series stuck forever with PS2/PSP/3DS design/specs. A "leap" has to happen once or twice a decade regardless of your platform of choice, not taking the leap is a sure way to keep a series stagnant, which Monster Hunter was throughout the 3DS era.

But you gotta work with what you have. Wrong decisions had already been made years ago by Capcom and it's too late to fix this in time for Wilds. All they can realistically do now is optimize the game to the best of their ability. Targeting a fewer platforms at launch may have helped with that and possibly got them money from platform holders. The two most successful Monster Hunter games both had timed exclusivity, and as far as I know didn't launch in such a terrible state on any platform. I know Wilds having a more proper "open world" probably presents inherent problems that won't be fixed with simple patches, but I think there is room for improvement though optimization, and future patches may prove this.

Regardless, this game is looking to crush the opening numbers of World and by extension Rise. 10 million+ incoming? The Asian market, especially China, is taking PC popularity to new heights.

It would be nice if they learned from this and decide to just tweak the engine into another fork of itself, so we can at least rest easy knowing they will have a team who works on the smaller map sized games with the default RE engine, and the ones working on future DD/MH games will be using the forked one for open world-style games. At least then we'd know what to expect from each dev team working with two variations of the same engine (or something similar).

Honestly I think Capcom did make the right choice in building their own engine, just like how Kojima had Fox engine put together, but Konami ended up using it poorly since Kojima left, but that's a different case study for engine misuse. With Capcom it's more they made the right choice in making their own engine fort their smaller games, but they made the wrong choice in thinking it would handle large open world games right off the bat. 

They'll have to work with what they've got for sure, but I hope this also doesn't deter them from sticking with what they have like with what happened to CDPR and them ditching their own RED engine after yrs of use, in favour of UE5, which has it's own heap of issues.

Also this is just me, but I know I don't own an RTX GPU, but I genuinely care very little for RT effects in modern games, and would have easily settled for games like MHW being pure raster-based rendered (which would have saved on some of the perf hit to some degree). 

Aye, despite it's current issues, it's absolutely smashing this month by a country mile. People have been wanting their new MH fix since Worlds, back in 2018 (nearly a console gen, but 6 yrs in gamer time can feel like a long wait).