I am a bundle of emotions right now and have so much to say about corporate greed in the video game industry, but I will narrow my focus to Monster Hunter Wilds and the path it has chosen for its character creator feature.
This is a bit of a compliment sandwich. Monster Hunter Wilds offers one of the best character creator setups I’ve experienced, even better than the best RPGs I’ve played. (Monster Hunter Wilds is technically an action RPG, but it’s more action than anything else.)
Unfortunately, the character creation process is flawed, and tragically so. Players have just a single opportunity to edit their character’s appearance in Monster Hunter Wilds, and if you want to edit it any further, you need a Character Edit Voucher. “What is that?” you may ask, and that’s a great question. It’s bad.
But before I dive any deeper, I will briefly mention that I’ve played Monster Hunter Wilds on a desktop-level Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU and an HP Omen 16 with a laptop-level Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, and I’ve recorded my experience of that down below (spoiler alert: it’s also not good).
Alright, let’s start making this sandwich.
Monster Hunter Wilds offers the best character creator
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Let’s be honest, most character creators shove some uncanny presets your way (don’t get me started with FromSoftware). Even recently, I’ve been playing Avowed, which I adore, but the biggest problem with that game is the character creator. Most of its presets don’t look good. I picked the one I liked best in the character creator screen and it still looked terrible in-game. This is a common issue when creating a character in any type of game (more on that below).
However, Monster Hunter Wilds comes in with these absolutely stunning presets. I always prepare myself to spend an hour or two on a character creation screen (seriously, I’m bad), but I didn’t need to this time around. I mean, I still did, but that’s because Capcom let me take full control over the character customization options.
You can configure everything from the hair and skin to the face shape and physique. And just so you know how in-depth these sections go, the Eye Shape tab includes 14 individual settings to customize height and rotation. I took advantage of all of the controls and made my character look as unique as I could. However, getting too deep into that is risky.
To bring me back to my point earlier, a common issue with character creators is that the characters never look the same outside of the creation menu. Why is that? Well, it comes down to the lighting and perspective. Fortunately, Capcom considered this and included some display tools you can enable in the creation menu.
With these tools, you can adjust the time of day and lighting position that your character is caught in. You can also disable or enable your hair and armor, adjust the facial expression, and even display little portraits that capture certain angles alongside the character creator. This is the most in-depth creation process I’ve seen in a game like this. I loved the character creators in the previous Monster Hunter titles, so I’m not too surprised this turned out so well.
Except it didn’t.
Monster Hunter Wilds offers the worst character creator
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No matter how many tools and features you provide us, we’re never going to get our character right the first time. It’s just not possible. Characters will never look the same as they do in the character creation menu, no matter how many lights and mirrors you shove in there. That’s because we’re not seeing our character in the action or cutscenes. The context matters. And so it’s a punch and spit in the face when a game tells me that I need a “Character Edit Voucher” to fix one issue I have with my character.
To be clear, I do have an issue with my character. Her skin is too dark and the game’s lighting cannot handle it. In the character creator, it looked like a warm, dark copper, but now it looks closer to cool, ebony.
As you may know, darker skin requires more lighting to highlight its features, and since the game’s lighting isn’t cutting it, my character is losing all her beautiful details. You can see the color difference above when I’m outside versus in the tent. The tents have similar lighting to the character creation screen, so I look good in there, but not outside… where the whole game takes place.
I would not be complaining at all if this silly “Character Edit Voucher” didn’t exist. How much is a voucher going to cost? Well, we don’t know, and we probably won’t until release. I reached out to Capcom for comment and am still waiting to hear back. But it will more than likely be a paid DLC. Dragon’s Dogma 2, also developed by Capcom, provides an in-game opportunity to edit your character, but it costs a currency that isn’t easy to farm. Otherwise, you need to purchase the $1.99 “Art of Metamorphosis.” That’s basically a “Character Edit Voucher.”
This is, quite frankly, a disgusting business practice in the gaming industry, especially for games that cost $70. People are spending enough money on these games. We do not need to suck the coins out of their wallets for a single mistake they made in character creation. A mistake that could’ve been prevented if developers offered a better way to playtest a character’s look in the character creator.
I hope there’s an easier in-game way to earn a Character Edit Voucher at the very least. But Capcom, please, just get rid of this practice. It’s not good for gaming, and it’s not good for your image.
No matter what game it is, you should always and forever be able to edit your character at any given time (please see Baldur’s Gate 3).
With my rant out of the way, let’s talk about how much trouble this game is to run.
How Monster Hunter Wilds runs on PC (desktop / laptop)
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Okay, I must preface this by saying that the performance issues I’ve experienced may no longer be relevant by the time Monster Hunter Wilds gets its full release (I hope). However, just in case it doesn’t improve, this is what you can expect.
I started Monster Hunter Wilds on my desktop (RTX 3080 GPU) at Ultra, 4K settings with Nvidia DLSS on Ultra Performance mode and I averaged around 38 frames per second. It took some severe dips down to 10 fps during high-density monster attacks, but also something as simple as entering a dialogue with another NPC. Even at the lowest settings (at 4K), I couldn’t get to 60 fps. (I also ran the benchmark tool and included the images above, but they don’t fully represent the in-game experience.)
I tried it on my laptop (RTX 4070 GPU) at Ultra, 1080p settings with Nvidia DLSS on Ultra Performance mode and averaged around 50 fps. Unfortunately, I experienced some of the same performance dips I did on my desktop.
The most frustrating bit of all of this was trying to play with my friend. She has an AMD RX 580 GPU, which is comparable with Capcom’s minimum spec requirement. The listed requirement is an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT GPU, which lands in a similar performance area. Yet, she had nothing but technical difficulties the entire time.
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First, the game wouldn’t launch unless it was in Windows compatibility mode. But when in Windows compatibility mode, the game wouldn’t register the textures, so you’d get this headache-inducing static flickering everywhere. I had her run the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark tool as well, and you can see above how that worked out despite being “playable.” Our choices were to not play or play terribly. It’s not much of a choice. So we’re waiting for release day to actually play together, where I hope Capcom comes in with some much-needed updates.
Capcom did say that the final version of the game runs a lot smoother than the current beta build that’s available, so I am hoping for good things.
However, this whole ordeal is further proof that Nvidia DLSS is becoming necessary to run games well. I highly recommend taking a look at our best gaming laptops page to help you run the demanding titles coming this year. (The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is a strong choice.)
However, Nvidia’s DLSS is even more improved in the RTX 50-series. If you wait a short while, you’ll benefit from multi-frame generation processes that’ll skyrocket the frame rate you get in these games. Now, I have my feelings about whether or not you should run DLSS 4 in games, but in times like these where you can barely get 30 fps, you have to do what you have to do.
