Monster Hunter Wilds – Open Beta Impressions

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This past weekend Capcom invited players to an open beta test for Monster Hunter Wilds. The beta gave us a sneak peek to what the Wilds will be like. It also allowed Capcom to stress test their servers for the amount of potential players as well as for cross-play.

This will be the first entry to be cross-play enabled. Cross play allows people to play together regardless of the platform. It’s incredibly exciting for fans of the series. This is an important feature for me as I’ll likely be playing on Xbox with friends all playing on PC. Being able to play with them no matter where they’re playing is just amazing.

Into the Wilds

After creating a character, you get a brief intro to the story and then it thrusts you into the action. You learn the mechanics as you go and at the end you fight a giant toad-like monster called a Chatacabra.

After the tutorial ends you get a nice thank you message for trying out the beta test. It loads you into the camp where you can pick from a few basic quests and four monsters to hunt.

When you load up the beta after this moment it prompts you to pick the kind of lobby to join. You can pick matchmaking options or type a code to enter a lobby. When I played my friends were already logged on. I just typed in their lobby code to join the same one.

Cross play/Connectivity

I played the Monster Hunter Wilds open beta on my Xbox Series X and my friends were on PC. They seemed to have no issues setting up link parties and adding each other as friends. I on the other hand, had issues all over the place. The invites they sent to me? I never got them. When I try to send any invites to anyone else? Error prompts come up on the screen. Ultimately, we figured out a solution. As long as you’re in the same lobby, you can start a quest and others can join. It’s clear that Capcom has a lot of bugs to work out regarding cross play.

I didn’t experience too many connection issues in my time with the beta. I had one disconnection and it was mid-quest. I’m not sure I’m a fan of how the game handled that situation. The game prompts a small error on the screen but lets you keep fighting the monster by yourself. I didn’t see any options to re-join the original quest. Even if I cancelled the quest on my end, I couldn’t rejoin the one my friend was on. That quest simply did not exist and we had to cancel the whole thing and start over. I hope the final game lets you to rejoin quests. That way you can more easily jump right back into the action.

Party of one… hundred

The lobbies in Monster Hunter Wilds can host up to 100 different players which seems quite amazing. You can create a “link party” and simply head out into the world to explore. Gone are the days of needing to start a quest before it allows you to see the map.

Monster Hunting

There’s far too many mechanics in Monster Hunter to explain all of it in this article. I will say that if you’ve played any previous Monster Hunter games then you’ll be right at home with Wilds. The series has been relatively unchanged as far as its core systems are concerned. That being said, it really does feel like Wilds does a lot to streamline the experience.

One new feature I really enjoyed was being able to have the seikret automatically ride to the objective. A single press of the d-pad enables this feature. It’s a really nice option, especially if you don’t have any clue how to get from place to place. We had a monster run to an area that we had never been on the map. After reaching it we agreed that having to navigate that ourselves would have been a nightmare.

Performance

On my Xbox Series X I had a mostly consistent frame rate and the game looked absolutely gorgeous. The frame rate dipped a few times during the peak of action. There was quite a lot happening on screen so I definitely understand why that happened.

I know some PC players had a hard time with graphical settings. You can find some hilarious images and clips of what some people are coming across. It’s very clear that Capcom has a lot of optimization work to do for the PC version.

Example of a PC player from the Monster Hunter subreddit encountering the monster, Chatacabra.

Example of what Chatacabra is supposed to look like.

Overall Thoughts

Monster Hunter Wilds definitely needs some polish but the open beta really helped showcase how fun this game will be. I’m excited to play the final release when it launches in February. Let’s hope that 4 months is enough time for Capcom to iron out the issues.