Monster Hunter Wilds may slow down on PC due to DLC checks, fan discovers
Capcom has been struggling with performance issues in Monster Hunter Wilds since its release. Several patches have been released, but the problems remain. As a result, some users are quietly taking matters into their own hands and trying to improve the situation on their own.
One such enthusiast is Reddit user de_Tylmarande, who discovered a strange feature affecting the performance of Wilds.
de_Tylmarande posted a long thread describing his "investigation." One day, he launched Monster Hunter Wilds on a friend's account and was surprised to find that the ubiquitous fps drops had disappeared. After de_Tylmarande returned to his own account, the game's performance began to falter again. After pondering and analyzing the situation, the user identified only one difference between the accounts: his friend had all the DLC for Wilds installed, while de_Tylmarande himself only had the base edition of the game.
After several tests, an interesting conclusion was reached: the more add-ons for Wilds a gamer purchased, the better the game's performance. This may be due to an "aggressive DLC availability check function."
de_Tylmarande suggested that Monster Hunter Wilds performs checks too often, which affects performance. The more DLCs available, the fewer checks the system has to perform. If all add-ons are installed, no checks are performed.
"On an account without DLC, I see severe and constant fps drops to around 20-25 frames in hubs, while on an account with all DLC purchased, the frame rate consistently exceeds 80 fps," said de_Tylmarande.
To test his theory, the user did not spend $500 on all the add-ons. Instead, he created a small mod that makes Wilds think that all DLCs are present on the account (but players do not have access to them, no piracy!). Roughly speaking, this thing bypasses the system check for DLC, thanks to which performance "skyrockets." "Yes, without processor turbo mode, in "Balance" mode. On any settings. The game literally flies," shared de_Tylmarande.
The user does not believe that Capcom is deliberately throttling Wilds' performance with this check. Most likely, it's just a bug in the code. de_Tylmarande has shared his observations and conclusions with Capcom, and he hopes that the developers will be able to fix it. But if the studio ignores the issue, then de_Tylmarande will finish his "mod" and release it exclusively in open source form.
As a reminder, after the December update for Monster Hunter Wilds, several more patches will be released to improve the stability of the Steam version, as well as add more graphics settings and presets, and more.