Monster Hunter Producer Says Fixing Wilds Was “Hardest Team Has Ever Worked
Monster Hunter Wilds’ PC launch was marred by issues. Poor performance and frequent crashes led the game to launch with “Mostly Negative” reviews on Steam, and frustrated discussions were frequent on forums like Reddit…
Monster Hunter Wilds’ PC launch was marred by issues. Poor performance and frequent crashes led the game to launch with “Mostly Negative” reviews on Steam, and frustrated discussions were frequent on forums like Reddit.
What followed was an intense period for the team at Capcom. Regular updates were rolled out, often fixing things, but sometimes making them worse.
At this year’s Tokyo Game Show, I got to speak to the game’s producer, Ryozo Tsujimoto, who told me that fixing the game was the “hardest the team has ever worked”, however, he has no regrets about releasing the game in the state that it launched.
Monster Hunter Wilds Performance Issues Were Due To Simultaneous PC And Console Launch, But The Team Has No Regrets
The conversation surrounding Monster Hunter Wilds' poor performance never really went away. Having had a little over 18 months to reflect on things, I asked Tsujimoto how he was feeling now.
”We’re grateful to have the opportunity to reflect on the original game, we continuously updated it,” he tells me. It leads me to ask him if it’s the hardest he and the team have had to work on the series.
”I would say so. It’s the first time we launched on PC and console simultaneously in the series’ history. That and many other things were very challenging,” he says. “The team really gave it their best, and I’m really proud of what we all managed to achieve. I hope that comes across to the fans.”
Having had such a period to reflect, I wondered if Tsujimoto would have done things differently, perhaps delaying the PC port to allow it to launch in a better state.
”I don’t think so, I have no regrets about that,” he says. “It’s what everybody wanted. It was a challenge we needed to take, the player base doesn’t want to be split by who gets to play first, and who plays catch up. We needed to take that step forward and break through.
”We learned a lot, and we’ll take those learnings from the challenges, and the good things, and put it to work in creating the best possible version of Ascendance and any future titles.”
Our chat with Tsujimoto also featured Genki Sunano, producer of Wilds’ Switch 2 version. The full chat, including how difficult it was to make things work on Nintendo’s latest platform, will be live on TheGamer in the near future.