Monster Hunter Wilds’ PC performance has always been abysmal ever since the title’s release a year ago. While Capcom has done a fair bit in recent title updates to fix some major bugs and FPS issues, there is still a lot to be demanded from the latest flagship entry.
In light of all of this, a Redditor who goes by the handle of de_Tylmarande has discovered that the more DLCs that you have purchased for Wilds, the better its performance. The Redditor had previously helped Capcom with Dragon’s Dogma 2 performance issues, allowing the community as well as modders to get every bit of FPS out of the game.
So if they are claiming that Capcom is gatekeeping performance behind a paywall, then it likely is the case.
Is Monster Hunter Wilds locking performance behind a paywall?
According to the Redditor, they had one day accidentally logged in through their friend’s account, thinking it was theirs, and found that not only had their saves vanished, but the game had a significant performance boost.
They soon realised that it was their friend’s account and deduced that performance was tied to the game’s additional content because their friend had all of the DLCs purchased and installed.
“And that is when I put two and two together. Yes, you understood correctly. And if you didn’t, I will say it directly – the more DLC you own, the better performance you get in the game. Why? Because Capcom focused so hard on microtransactions, they implemented an insanely crooked and aggressive DLC ownership check function. And no, it is not about protection or anticheat or whatever – it is just a DLC presence check.”
Upon further testing, they found that every time you boot up Wilds, the game does aggressive testing to see which of the DLCs you own. While this is not intentional on Capcom’s part, the constant checking is what leads to the sudden performance dips and FPS issues in the game.
The Redditor then created a mod that tricked the game into thinking that they had purchased all of the mods. They then noticed an immediate performance boost where Wilds was running buttery smooth on their system.
All of these findings have been sent to Capcom support, hopefully, there will be more info on this from them in the coming weeks.
