A look at Monster Hunter: World's PC port
Then, Monster Hunter finally returned to home consoles, in the form of Monster Hunter: World. It was here that the series found massive worldwide appeal and success. Critics, fans, and newcomers alike all praised the changes made, and how the core of the series remained the same, while allowing for modernization and accessibility.
If you want to hear a full rundown of everything, you can check out our official review, done by @MajinCubyan in which the game was given a stellar score of 9.8, one of the highest scores the site has awarded.
Though our reviewer found the game to be near perfect, I myself have a much more negative view of the series. My first experience with the franchise started on the PlayStation Portable's Monster Hunter: Freedom Unite. Back then, I thought the concept as interesting, but the overall game itself controlled too awkwardly, and again, with Tri, and 4, and Generations. There was this clunkiness to the combat that I found undesirable, and despite how many times I tried to get into the series, I gave up.
When it was announced that World would be releasing for the first time on PC's, it was big news. A huge market was just waiting to play the game, excited to finally get in on the monster hunting craze. With over 2 million sales since its launch last week, Monster Hunter: World has done incredibly well on the platform.
Except, there's a definite clunk getting in the way of the experience. And I don't mean the controls this time.
The PC version of Monster Hunter: World ranges from un-bootable dumpster fire, to un-optimized mess, and for some lucky few, it actually manages to run decently.
"Mixed" reviews from Steam users.
Steam's boards have been full of angry customers demanding a fix, and fans have been spending the past week tinkering with the game, trying to find which settings they need to carefully toggle in order to get it to actually function. Capcom has at least noticed that there's been lots of connection errors, and are working to fix this specific issue. Some fixes involve turning off Steam's Big Picture Mode, or disabling the Steam Overlay entirely, as having both of those on can cause problems. Constant connections to servers after completing quests also trigger a multitude of alerts if you've enabled the option to see what your friends are playing, as Steam will constantly let you know Friendname is playing Monster Hunter, over and over again, even though they're just completing a mission. Some even had their save file corrupted and rendered unusable, randomly.
Others are looking to correct Capcom's errors, in the form of mods. "Special K", by Kaldaien lets you Alt-Tab out of fullscreen mode without instantly crashing the game, alongside other fixes. Digital Foundry went through the process of checking every single option in the game's graphical settings, coming to the conclusion that some of the options are downright broken and don't even display correctly. In summary, if you have a GTX 1060 and i5 8400, you're going to be able to hit 60fps, but even then, it won't outperform the Xbox One X or PlayStation 4 Pro console versions, even remotely, visually.
As far as my experiences go, my i5 6600k/GTX 1070 setup found massive issues. Immediately after downloading the game from Steam, I could not even get the game to start.
Which, to my surprise, after the 20th attempt, did work. I was greeted with the actual menu. The game worked, and I was playing it, finally. What I have experienced, once getting past that initial hurdle, was middling. Despite having a "powerful" PC, I still found it stuttering at 1440/60, tending to dip to around 38fps or so, on average.
In the awkward, slow, stuttering mess, I accidentally smacked an Aptonoth in the face, as the constant fluctuations in framerate made everything hard to control. I apologized profusely to the distressed polygonal fictional dinosaur on my screen, and then the game crashed.
Through the review copy for PC that I've been provided with, I've run into multiple issues. Finally, I installed the Special K mod, and turned some the settings down. I do still run into that random crash from above when launching it, but eventually, the game does start up, and I don't tend to run into errors past that. Foliage Sway and Volume Rendering were both turned off, and with my aforementioned 6600k/1070 setup, I found a solid, stable 1080p/60fps experience. You could maybe even get away with 1440p on a similar rig, just with a few more bumps.
Monster Hunter's debut on PC is serviceable and nothing more. Perhaps in time we'll see patches and performance improvements, but for now, you'll be dealing with a rocky port that takes some tweaking to run right. It's nowhere near perfect, but if you're looking for that Monster Hunter experience on PC, or all your friends are playing, you might as well go for it.
