Now that all the content updates have been released, meaning the base game is effectively complete, it felt like a good time to revisit my thoughts on Wilds' base game. For some context, I've been playing Monster Hunter games since 3U released in 2013, and the first ~230 hours of my playtime on Wilds were built up in the initial two months after launch.

To quickly summarize my most important thoughts: I think this is the strongest High Rank game we've ever had in the mainline series and one of the strongest High Rank experiences in the franchise. The monster roster is very good and the gameplay feels like a significant improvement from its World/Iceborne roots, which are the two most important parts of a Monster Hunter game. However, even for a High Rank game, it does feel abnormally easy until you start hitting the endgame (HR50+), where it ramps up and starts feeling much better. Performance is acceptable in its current state, though it still leaves a lot to be desired considering the level of fidelity on display. The main story is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, the prodigal child it revolves around is annoying, and there's several lengthy auto-walking segments that always drag the pacing to a crawl - but that all becomes irrelevant once you finish Low Rank (which should take you 15-20 hours). You suffer through it once and then basically never worry about it again.

The game is in a fairly good spot now. While I always hesitate to recommend any $70 game at its full price, I think that most of the potential for buyers' remorse has been eliminated by now, and if you're comfortable paying that much then you won't regret it. If you can get the game on any kind of discount then it's much easier to endorse. Unless these sorts of grind-focused action games just aren't something you get along with, I guess.

I'm eagerly awaiting the G Rank expansion. If Capcom can come back with a roster of additions that's a similar size and quality level to that of the base game, then Wilds will probably dethrone GU as my favorite title in the franchise. But that remains to be seen.

If that's enough information for you, great. If not, here's some additional detail for each of the points I mentioned above.

This feels like a refined and more responsive version of World/Iceborne, which makes sense as the two entries share a director in Yuya Tokuda. In many ways, Wilds is like a spiritual successor to World. I main Hunting Horn, and in my opinion this is easily the best iteration of the weapon we've ever had. It restores the emphasis on positioning and predictive play that had fallen by the wayside in Rise/Sunbreak, while doing a better job of incentivizing aggressive play than previous entries. I've also logged a few dozen hunts with most of the other weapons, and those too feel like improved versions of their World counterparts. Safe to say that unless the only way you could have fun was spamming SAEDs with Charge Blade, you'll probably be pretty happy with how your main feels right now.

As I said before, I think the monster roster is very strong. That isn't to say that there are no weak links; rather, that even the most forgettable fights are still enjoyable in the moment. There aren't any true stinkers in the game right now, no equivalent to World's Lavasioth or Rise's Almudron. Nothing so unfun or annoying that it makes you want to stop playing for the day after a handful of hunts. For me, the closest thing to that is the returning siege monster you'll find after reaching the endgame. It's another one of the heavily scripted pseudo-raid fights that World became somewhat infamous for, and it just makes me sad. The original version of the fight wasn't exactly exciting either, but loading the cannons and activating various arena traps was still more enjoyable than any of the bespoke mechanics created for Wilds' rendition of it.

Around launch, the game received a lot of criticism for being too easy, and it's not entirely unfounded. Even though this is just a High Rank game and those are always on the easier side, the power delta between your hunter and the various monsters is much higher than it's been in the past. Focus Mode gives you the ability to freely aim all of your attacks with very little downside, meaning that mistakes are punished less harshly. The wound mechanic allows smart players to chain flinches and knockdowns together in ways that we've never been able to before. The effect is frankly comical on some monsters. And wounds are very easy to exploit as you progress through the game, it isn't until the endgame hunts that wounds become noticeably harder to create. I made it all the way to HR50 before failing a quest for the first time, and my weapon has historically been the worst out of all melee options.

Outside of the 9- and 10-star endgame hunts, which are properly hard, the difficulty just isn't going to be there until G Rank comes out. If you want a hard Monster Hunter experience right now, the Risen Elders and high-level Anomaly fights in Sunbreak are your best bet. You could also go load up GU's Hypers or EX Deviants. Hell, if you really get off on putting your genitals in a bench vice then go look up how to play on a Frontier private server. I've done all of those and had a blast in each of them.

The weakest aspect here is how large some of the maps are while not having enough points of interest to justify the size. Just flat open spaces for the sake of encouraging you to ride your mount. It's also annoying that several shortcuts between zones are inaccessible if you're on foot, particularly in the early maps. The game conditions you to enable full self-driving, and that makes it harder for you to feel connected to the world like learning maps in previous games could.

I don't have much more to add here aside from it being ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and feeling like a slog because of the regular autoscrolling segments. The story in a MH game being bad shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's played one before, it's always been an afterthought and it wasn't until World that they tried upping the production value, but this one really left a bad taste in my mouth. The prodigal child it's supposed to revolve around is distinctly unlikable and annoying every time he's on screen. The main story beats are nonsensical and the conclusion is very underwhelming. Thankfully you only have to do it once, and it doesn't take very long to get through (despite how it feels at times).

Most areas of the game run acceptably in their current state. I play at 1440p and average 60-65 FPS on mostly High settings with FSR running in Native Anti-Aliasing mode, however some parts still drop into the low 50s or even mid 40s. One thing to note about my specs is that my 6800XT is overclocked to 2.5GHz, so if you have the same card then your performance may be a bit worse than mine. The heavier parts of the game still seem CPU-bound so it might not make a huge difference either. Fact is that the RE engine just doesn't cut it for open-world games, which is something that Capcom has known for some time, but they couldn't get the upgraded REX engine ready in time for this game's launch. Hopefully the next mainline game will be fully built on it, which would bypass all the issues this game had from backporting a ton of work to the old RE engine.

Even on a mix of High and Highest settings, including the optional high-res texture pack, the game really doesn't look good enough to justify being so hard to run. It's certainly an upgrade over World, but it's not a huge one in terms of actual visual fidelity. Fur looks much better, textures are noticeably sharper, characters and environments are more detailed... however there's still a certain blurriness to the presentation even with all the usual suspects disabled (upscaling, motion blur, TAA, volumetric fog, DoF, etc). You won't always notice it but it sticks out every time you do.

if you have an amd graphics card, prepare to be subjected to random crashes with no explanation that happen so often you're afraid to play online or enter certain areas, but not often enough to happen before you've played for 2 hours.
this is unacceptable. the game has been out for a year

Game is fine, endgame is unnecessarily stressful because all content are heavily centered around counter mechanics. Which would be fine, but Capcom decided it was a brilliant idea to give monsters wildly inconsistent hitboxes, and give the player enough counter frames to miss the counter if the dilation of monster's ass is 2 millimeters too narrow.

This predictably results in endgame being over saturated with players who struggle to beat Chatacabra looking to get carried by teams spawn farming Gogmazios wings to lobotomize his existence.

On the bright side, if you are into self pain but are scared of needles, then this game might be the right one for you.

final score: 3 seikret riders out of 5 ATs