Monster Hunter Wilds Is Technically Playable, But Still Not Enjoyable

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The Monster Hunter series quickly grew into one of my favorites since I played Monster Hunter World, and it took me on a journey backward to fall in love with the entire franchise. The careful planning and grinding needed to take down the giant monsters and improve our gear hooked me, and being able to do it all with friends made it even better. The newest entry in the series, Monster Hunter Wilds, continues that trend, though it did release with some performance issues. It was ultimately unplayable on the Steam Deck when it released, so it came as a huge surprise to me to see it getting the Playable badge yesterday.

With the new badge, Valve has made it known that the game is actually playable on the Steam Deck, except for needing to bring up the virtual keyboard manually. This completely shocked me because I still remember the game barely being able to run consistently on the Steam Deck. Of course, the game has had updates, but it felt like there was no way we would be getting a stable frame rate that was stuck within the playable range. So, I decided to try it out for myself to see if it really has improved, and compared to when it launched, I would consider it playable.

On average, it’s stuck at 30 FPS much more often, and on the lowest possible settings, it was even able to average above that. I was quite surprised by how well it was running when I still remember it chugging along beforehand.

I decided to record and test the game to show a little bit of what my experience is like, and as we can see in the framerate distribution graph below, the majority of frames are 30 FPS and above. However, there’s still a good chunk below, which indicates a good chunk of fluctuation. And we can see that there are still some stutters with the 1% and 0.1% values being on the much lower side. This graph is based on an entire hunt for the Congala in the Scarlet Forest area, which lasted around 9 minutes. I have tested the game a little bit more in other areas, and the experience is pretty consistent with what’s shown in the graph.

And as we can see in the expanded view, we are still pushing the Steam Deck pretty hard.

Now, while performance is better than it used to be, the visuals are still awful. We need the lowest setting to run this at a stable frame rate, and because of that, it looks like it has a constant blur filter over it. It’s playable, but nowhere near what I would consider decent-looking. There are some major compromises to play this on the go, and I don’t think I could say it’s worth doing.

However, if you want to grind and go on a few quests or get some materials, doing it on the Steam Deck might be the way to go. I can see it being great for short bursts, but there’s no way I would play this mainly on the deck.

Monster Hunter Wilds is on sale right now for $29.39 until tomorrow for the Steam Summer Sale.

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