A Monster Hunter Wilds player may have discovered an unusual reason for the game’s performance issues on PC.
Reddit user de_Tylmarande posted a lengthy message on the Monster Hunter Reddit page (as spotted by 80 Level), suggesting that the game performs better on PC when all the DLC is installed.
The player first noticed a discrepancy when they logged into their friend’s account and noticed that the constant FPS drops they had been experiencing were suddenly gone and the game was performing much better.
Confused, they logged back into their own account and the issues returned.
“Okay, I delete the save, replay the exact same scenario 1:1, run through the intro/tutorial again, go to the hub – and performance is on the floor,” they wrote. “I relog back into my friend account – and everything is fine. Nonsense. Shock. I refused to believe what I was seeing.”
de_Tylmarande soon realised that the only difference between their account and their friend’s account was that their friend owns all the DLC for Monster Hunter Wilds, whereas they only own the standard base edition.
After performing more tests, de_Tylmarande came to the conclusion that “the more DLC you own, the better performance you get in the game”, due to what they allege is an “aggressive DLC ownership check function”.
According to their hypothesis, the game continually checks to see if DLC is present, doing it so frequently that it has a severe effect on performance. Once it sees the DLC, the game stops checking and performance improves.
Based on this theory, the more DLC the player has installed, the fewer checks the game makes (and the better the game runs), and if the player has all DLC installed, the game stops making checks entirely.
To test this, de_Tylmarande set up two different accounts on the same PC – one with the base Monster Hunter game installed and nothing else, the other with all DLC bought – to see how they performed.
“On the account with no DLC I get heavy and stable FPS drops down to like 20-25 in hubs, while on the account with all DLC bought it’s 80+ FPS,” they claimed. They then ran the test on a separate PC and got the same results.
Rather than spending $500 on all the DLC to check their theory, the player created a small mod for the game that made it think all the DLC was present. This mod doesn’t actually give the player the DLC – it doesn’t pirate it, in other words – but simply skips the DLC check.
“And yes, performance went through the roof,” they claimed. “Yes, without any CPU boost, in Balance mode. On any settings. The game literally flies.”
de_Tylmarande warned that they didn’t recommend creating or using similar mods with the game, and was only doing so to test the theory. They have passed their findings on to Capcom in the hope it will look into the issue and adjust the DLC check function.
They also stressed that, as far as they see it, Capcom didn’t deliberately hamper the game’s performance with the DLC check, and that “it’s just a bug in the code they need to fix”.
In theory, however, if Capcom can change the way the game checks for DLC, it could solve performance issues for many players on Steam, where the game currently only has 49% positive user reviews.
“I also want to publicly state this upfront,” they added. “If Capcom don’t fix this mess, I’ll finish the ‘mod’, but it will be released strictly as open source, and it won’t be distributed in a closed (binary), let alone encrypted form. And again, that’s only a last resort option if Capcom end up ignoring the issue.”
During a financial results Q&A in November, Capcom said it foresaw little risk of its next big game, Resident Evil Requiem, experiencing performance issues on PC like Monster Hunter Wilds.
“Resident Evil Requiem differs from Monster Hunter Wilds in terms of gameplay, system architecture, and network features,” it said. “At present, we do not anticipate similar risks. We are developing the game to provide a smooth gaming experience across a wide range of PC specifications.”
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