Monster Hunter Wilds’ launch was pretty divisive. On the one hand, many people praised its narrative, combat improvements, and map design in general. However, its difficulty, performance issues, and content cadence have brought Wilds to one of the worst lows of the franchise, at least on Steam. For some weeks, Monster Hunter Wilds has been on the “mostly negative” score review limbo. Sadly, it seems that the only thing that will bring this new entry to the heights we were all hoping for is its expansion or faster FTUs.
Monster Hunter Wilds Score On Steam Is One of the Lowest for the Series
Let’s address the Nergigante in the room, or lack thereof because that monster isn’t even in Wilds. If you head to the game’s Steam page, you’ll see it’s been sitting at “Mostly Negative.” That’s been going on for over 30 days, according to Valve’s platform. Now, what’s the reason, or rather, reasons behind this?
Sadly, there are many, but the ones that stand out the most pertain to difficulty issues, poor performance on PC, and updates coming in small bites while also taking too long to roll out.
“Game is too easy and is lacking in content for its price. New updates are dropped at a snail’s pace.” – Daddy Isn’t Done Speaking via Steam.
“Incredible game, but it definetely needs urgent fixes to performance and server connections. I’m tired of how long it takes to get into a server.” – LeoSans via Steam.
These are only a few of the opinions hunters have on the latest installment, and they perfectly hit the nail on Wilds‘ most significant issues. Monster Hunter Wilds, in many ways, had a solid start. However, we all know that Monster Hunter games should keep players around. Yet, Wilds had nothing of the sort, at least with the base game content. Furthermore, the title updates take too long to show up, and the limited-time events barely provide any reasons to return to the game.
Capcom will likely fix these things when the expansion rolls out, but as I’ve said before, waiting for an expansion to fix the game’s core issues shouldn’t be the norm. Yet, it is something that Capcom has done for its previous Monster Hunter titles, and we saw it with Sunbreak, which made things much better for Rise players.
Wilds Has Lost Almost 99% Of Its Playerbase On PC
Beyond the Monster Hunter Wilds reviews, another alarming thing is how quickly Monster Hunter Wilds lost its playerbase. But if you don’t believe me, let’s look at the numbers.
Monster Hunter Wilds reached its peak in March, a few days after its release. It reached 1,384,608 players, which is quite a feat for the game and commendable. However, at the time of writing, there are only 6,978 players, which is roughly a 99% decrease.
Now, let’s look at Monster Hunter World, but allow me to put a disclaimer first. World launched on consoles first and landed on PC almost seven months later. With that in mind, most players were on PlayStation or Xbox platforms. Still, I’m comparing the numbers so you can primarily see the player retention aspect.
Monster Hunter World reached a peak of 334,684 players, and six months after its release, which is almost the same amount of time that Wilds has been out, it had 62,572 players, roughly an 81% decrease. But wait, here comes the kicker: Monster Hunter World has more players right now, than Wilds. It might not mean much to some, but World is still outperforming Wilds.
Many will think this comparison is unnecessary, but I’m showing the numbers from the same timeframe of both games, six months after their release on PC. So, the state of Monster Hunter Wilds is disheartening, to say the least.
Yet, there’s always a light at the end of the monster-infested tunnel: the expansion. While I’m not a big fan of having to wait almost a year for an Iceborne or Sunbreak situation to fix Monster Hunter Wilds, I’m sure that DLC will improve the review scores. I really hope it does. If not, Wilds will be left in this limbo, and we’ll all do the one thing that always works for Monster Hunter fans: return to World.
