There's no denying the fact that Capcom released an absolute slam dunk with Monster Hunter Wilds. Arguably the best-ever Monster Hunter game yet, the thing about it is that it's a technically subpar product, to boot. What I mean by this is that it runs way, way worse than it should, based on how it looks.

Nobody expected Monster Hunter Wilds to run all that well, keep in mind. Those of us who were there at day one for World will recall that it, too, ran extremely poorly on the mainstream PC of the day. On top of being thoroughly broken in certain respects. The key expectation, instead, was that the game's graphics would warrant such a massive performance malus. As they did with Dragon's Dogma 2, for example, which looks astonishingly good in comparison.

Instead, what we got in Monster Hunter Wilds 1.0 was a game that looks decidedly last-gen on top of running poorly. Thankfully, the tides are now turning, and Capcom is seemingly hard at work on fixing these problems. Enter Update 1.010 - the very first major patch for the game on PC!

Monster Hunter Wilds, available right here at 2Game!

Update 1.010.00.00 Steam Release Date: April 4

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of what Update 1.010 is all about, jot down its exact release window: it's April 4, 2025 at 3:00 AM UTC. That's April 3, 2025, 8:00 PM PT for those on the other end of the planet.

The download, crucially, is going to be 6 GB on Steam for those with regular textures installed. Those of us running the High Resolution Texture Pack DLC will have a 16 GB download in tow, instead.

Patch Notes & Highlights

Update 1.010's got two big draws to it, in practice. The first is a substantial list of content additions (i.e. new monsters, etc.), and other is a suite of technical improvements to the game's performance. Well, we say "suite," but this really is just Capcom's first proper step towards making Wilds enjoyable to play on sub-par machines.

"Improvements were made to VRAM usage," says the official patch notes log, "and the DirectStorage version has been upgraded."

We're going to thoroughly test these claims over the weekend, but we do think it's important to set the right expectations here: this will not improve your average frame-rate in a meaningful way unless Capcom's changing other things under the hood as well. VRAM usage is for one a very binary thing: either you have enough and it makes no difference to performance, or you don't have enough and you get an extremely problematic 10 FPS bottleneck to how the game runs. DirectStorage, on the other hand, will mainly affect loading and zone passage stutters.

So, improvements for sure, but Capcom is going to need to continue iterating on Monster Hunter Wilds' technical suite for a good long while still. With that out of the way, here are some other notable boons included in Update 1.010:

You can read the full patch notes, which are admittedly rather chunky, using the link to the official blog above. It's a solid showing but, once again, Capcom is going to need to keep this up to get Wilds to a state that the game so obviously deserves.

An Early Standout Patch, or a Sign of Things to Come?

And that's really the big question, isn't it? Is Capcom going to continue working on Monster Hunter Wilds' technical backend, or are we in for a repeat of what went down with Monster Hunter World? Now, we can obviously run World very, very well on modern machines, but do keep in mind that the game itself is still rather outdated in some key areas. The most egregious example of this being the case is, for example, World's extremely old DLSS 1.0 upscaler, which makes it impossible for players themselves to update or improve upon the upscaler in any meaningful way.

So, fingers crossed that Capcom keeps up what it's been doing so far. Monster Hunter Wilds is a serious contender for 2025's GOTY, provided that we continue seeing further improvements in all pertinent areas, and Capcom has a chance to really make this franchise a must-play on all modern platforms if that happens. Let's hope for the best, and stay tuned for further testing on our end!

Monster Hunter Wilds, available right here at 2Game!

Wilder and wilder.