A lot has already been said of Monster Hunter Wilds‘ upcoming Switch 2 port. The game, with all its free DLC updates – including new monsters – will be available 5th December, arriving with local co-op support to harken back to those old Gathering Hall days on the PSP or 3DS (if you’re an old-head, like me).
It’s looking like an ambitious port – something that shouldn’t be that surprising to anyone familiar with Capcom’s other Switch 2 projects. Pragmata, Resident Evil Requiem and more have all been well-recieved, mostly thanks to the immense amount of technical work the developer’s engineers put into the ports.
Now, in an interview with Kotaku, Capcom has shed a little bit more light on how it’s managed to get a game as complicated and sizeable as Monster Hunter Wilds – that’s had (in)famous performance complaints – running on the Switch 2. Turns out, it’s been a “painstaking process”.
“The Nintendo Switch 2 version of Monster Hunter Wilds was developed around the concept of delivering a natural Monster Hunter Wilds experience on Nintendo Switch 2,” producer Genki Sunano told the publication. “In other words, we didn’t want it to feel like a simple port, where the graphics or performance had merely been scaled down to make the game run on Nintendo Switch 2.” Sunano went on to state that the company’s goal was to bring the same experience people have had on PC or console to Nintendo Switch 2 “without compromising the experience of Monster Hunter Wilds”.
But doing that was not easy. “It was this painstaking, and at times seemingly endless, process of making decisions and optimisations one by one that proved to be one of our biggest challenges in delivering a comfortable handheld experience while preserving what makes Wilds feel like Wilds.” The result seems to be agreeable, at least: the game runs at a solid 30FPS in handheld mode, even when running taxing multiplayer hunts.
And this will all help lay the foundations for this version of the game – and others – as Capcom gets ready to deploy the massive new content update at some point in 2027. “We plan to apply the knowledge and expertise gained through this project to the performance improvements that we will be making for existing platforms in the lead-up to the release of Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance.”
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I’m curious to see how the final game runs on Switch 2: I like how it performs and looks on my PS5 Pro, and I’m wondering if I’ll be able to trade in the lush visuals and buttery performance for the ease of slaying hundreds of Rathalos on the go. I’ll be picking up a copy on Switch 2 either way, but the jury is out on where my ‘home’ for the game is going to be, come December.
We know that Capcom has been sinking a lot of time into Wilds, with the publisher’s eventual goal orientated towards “surpassing” the dizzying heights of Monster Hunter World and its popularity. To this end, it seems Capcom has all hands on deck with the upcoming expansion, Ascendance, something we’re hoping to see more of in due course.
