Monster Hunter Wilds sleuth has seemingly uncovered bizarre reason for performance drops: "I refused to believe what I was seeing"

Monster Hunter Wilds was one of last year’s biggest releases, and still draws in huge crowds each day. Capcom’s beast-slaying co-op game may be a hit, but even now as it approaches its first birthday in February, the game is still held back by performance issues – particularly on PC. Capcom has taken many swings at improving the experience, and it is notably better than at launch, but frame rate drops remain a mysterious thorn in Wilds’ side that the developer has been unable to fully remove. However, one Monster Hunter Wilds player believes they’ve found an unusual reason why performance issues persist despite all of Capcom’s efforts – it may be tied to how much DLC you own.

Let me make one thing very clear from the outset – this issue currently hasn’t been acknowledged by Capcom (although I have reached out for comment) and doesn’t appear to be intentional, before people jump to conclusions about this potentially being a ploy to get people to buy DLC. However, Reddit user ‘de_Tylmarande’ has posted a lengthy message on the Monster Hunter subreddit which claims the game’s performance improves dramatically when all the available DLC is installed.

In their post, they claim that they noticed significantly better performance when playing Monster Hunter Wilds on their friends’ Steam account versus their own. They hopped between accounts several times, and the difference in frame rates was repeated each time they switched back and forth. “I relog back into my [friend’s] account – and everything is fine. Nonsense. Shock. I refused to believe what I was seeing,” they say.

Initially, they couldn’t work out what was different about the two accounts, but then they noticed that his friend “owns absolutely all” of Monster Hunter Wilds’ pieces of DLC – a fact I personally find hard to believe, but is not outside the realm of possibility if they’re a megafan.

It’s worth noting that ‘DLC’ refers to the dozens of individual cosmetic add-ons available for Wilds, and things like Palico and Character Edit Vouchers which let you change certain elements of your appearance. If you include the game’s soundtrack, Steam lists 190 pieces of individual DLC content for the game – while letting fans pick and choose individual, affordable cosmetics could be seen as a positive, that’s obviously a lot of add-ons to monitor. As a result, de_Tylmarande theorized that “DLC presence checks” could be responsible for Wilds’ performance issues.

To further test the theory, de_Tylmarande says they “quickly made a small ‘mod’ that made the game think I have all DLC present.” This wasn’t an unlock tool, which would get them in some serious trouble with Capcom, but rather a way for the game to skip the alleged presence checks. On the same PC, they then tested two more Steam accounts – one that owned the base game but no add-ons, and one with the game plus the mod that’d resemble having all the DLC purchased. “On the account with no DLC I get heavy and stable fps drops down to like 20-25 in [hub areas], while on the account with all DLC bought it’s 80+ fps,” they claim. They’ve also apparently conducted this same experiment on another PC with different specs and achieved similar results.

The Redditor claims to have sent their findings to a Capcom contact they worked with previously when reporting similar performance issues in Dragon’s Dogma 2, and that the videogame performance gurus at Digital Foundry have contacted them and are also “on the case.” They also state that “if Capcom [doesn’t] fix this mess, I’ll finish the ‘mod’ – but it will be released strictly as open source […] and again, that’s only a last-resort option if Capcom ends up ignoring the issue.”

As I mentioned, I’ve reached out to Capcom for comment on these claims and to see if it intends to investigate de_Tylmarande’s findings. If this does turn out to be one of the main reasons for Monster Hunter Wilds’ performance woes, it’ll be equal parts relieving and frustrating for fans. Even if this doesn’t get publicly acknowledged by Capcom, it’ll be interesting to see if some kind of fix relating to DLC items appears in future patch notes – and if frame rates pick up as a result.