Monster Hunter Wilds beta’s frequently moving monsters were a bug, director says

The monsters in Monster Hunter Wilds’ open beta moved around more than they should have due to a bug, the game’s director has told VGC.

Capcom ran an Open Beta period for the game which started on October 29 on PS5 Plus, and November 1 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Steam. The beta ended for everyone on November 4.

Although players generally enjoyed the beta, one of the most common complaints was that the monsters ran away too often.

Usually in a Monster Hunter game, when a large monster is weakened to a certain point it will run off to another part of the map, where the battle can continue.

In the beta, however, monsters were sometimes running off after only being attacked a few times, frustrating some players.

Those worried this will carry over to the full game can rest assured this isn’t the intention, as director Yuya Tokuda explained to VGC.

According to Tokuda, the constant movement of the monsters was a bug in the beta, and has now been fixed. The preview version we played didn’t appear to have the issue.

“The fact is that the Open Beta test was an earlier version that actually had some bugs in it, and one of them was that the monsters were moving more often than intended,” Tokuda explained to us.

“It wasn’t actually a design intention to have them be so rapidly moving, it was just that every X amount of seconds they just were moving on, and it wasn’t something we were planning for.

“So we’ve gone ahead and fixed that bug, so we’ve now seen since the Beta test lots of feedback, and that and many other things are being improved for the final game, and also just the general processing of how monsters decide where to go next and what to do – that’s being refined towards the full game.

“So the experience that people get when they get monsters will be closer to what you played [at the press event], and it won’t be like the beta test, which was something of an unintentional occurrence.”

Further reading

‘We’re at the next level’: Monster Hunter Wilds’ creators on the secret behind Capcom’s new golden era

We visited Capcom in Japan for a behind-the-scenes look at Monster Hunter Wilds

Tokuda also told VGC that the game’s overall performance will be better than that in the Open Beta, as the team continues to work on improving the game as its February 28 release date nears.

“The [press event preview] build you played today has been the latest up-to-date build compared to the open beta test, which I think is the last time everyone would have played the game,” Tokuda said, “and we’ve been working on improving the performance on the full build and squashing bugs and that kind of thing.

“At the moment, the graphics priority mode is running at 4K with 30 frames per second variable frame rate, so it is a little higher than that in certain scenes.

“Conversely, with the frame rate priority mode, it is aiming to keep 60 frames per second, and of course, when certain very intense scenes happen, such as during the massive storms that happen during the weather changes, there will be some dips there, but that’s the target that we’re looking at at the moment for performance.”