Latest news with #MonsterHunterWilds'
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Nintendo Switch revolutionised on-the-go gaming – can the PlayStation Portal do the same?
Happy Monster Hunter Wilds week to all who celebrate: Capcom's thrilling action game has sold 8m units in three days, which means that quite a lot of you are likely to be playing it. I'm a huge fan of this series and am delighted by the latest entry, but after filing the review last week, I've barely had a minute to play it since it came out. Regular readers will know that this is a familiar problem for me: I have two kids, so my gaming time is tight, and the living room TV is very often in use. I anticipated this, so in the run-up to Monster Hunter Wilds' release, I spent £200 on a PlayStation Portal – essentially a screen sandwiched between two halves of a PlayStation 5 controller. I can't decide whether it's one of the most unwieldy things that Sony has ever come out with, or one of the most elegant. It lets me stream games from my PS5, so the console can be whirring away under the TV and I can be on the sofa with my little screen, swinging a transforming axe at a dreadful octopus. Here's how the Portal works: you turn it on, and it makes pleasing futuristic noises. A circular portal appears, pulsing soothingly, as it tries to connect to your home console. Then, if it works (sometimes it took a few attempts for me), your PlayStation 5 homepage appears through that portal, and expands to fill the whole of the screen in your hands. Then you can play everything just as you would on your TV, with controller rumble and haptic feedback and everything. When the internet connection falters, the device downgrades the game's appearance rather than booting you out; it'll let the game become a soup of pixels and weird messy visual artefacts rather than forcing you to reconnect. I have played with a whole bunch of game-streaming 'solutions' over the years (the first was Gaikai, way back in 2009, which offered games like World of Warcraft streamed from the cloud, still very novel at the time), and they have always been, well, suboptimal. No matter how good your internet connection was, there was always just that bit too much lag. Streamed games always looked noticeably worse. Wifi was never quite reliable enough. But the Portal works stunningly well on my home wifi. Monster Hunter looks perfect. It's a demanding action game, so any lag quickly makes it feel unplayable, yet I have been able to play it on the Portal for many hours without feeling too frustrated. You can also use the Portal to play PS5 games away from home, using the device to turn your console on remotely in your empty house (tip: yank the HDMI cable out the back before you leave so it won't turn your TV on). I took the Portal on a wee half-term holiday with my family – certainly more convenient than packing up an entire console and all its gubbins – and had a go at connecting to my home PlayStation 5 from my hotel room. It took a few tries, but it did work even on hotel wifi, which I found near-miraculous. Unfortunately, under these circumstances, the streaming quality was sometimes so bad that the game looked worse than it did 15 years ago on the PSP, and the lag was unbearable. It was not the on-the-go PlayStation gaming experience I was hoping for. The Portal is a useful little gadget – at home, when it works. And that is the case with any kind of internet-reliant game streaming: it's good when it works. One day I would love to be able to play my games wherever I am, without sacrificing the quality of the experience, but streaming technology hasn't gotten there yet and I'm starting to wonder if it ever will. It's certainly gotten better: I've streamed games from the Xbox's Game Pass library on my home console with only the occasional problem. But what I really want is to be able to stream games to a handheld when I'm in my office or travelling. The Nintendo Switch was released eight years ago, and it remains the gold standard of at home/on-the-go hybrid gaming – because it doesn't rely on an internet connection. It just works, seamlessly: you pick it up and take it with you, put it in the dock and it instantly appears on the TV. The Switch changed my life, by letting me fit my game time around my job, friends, travel and family. The Steam Deck has also been transformative, letting me take a game I'm reviewing (or enjoying) from my office to my house, or play it on a long-haul flight. We're used to this now, after almost a decade, but it was truly one of the most revolutionary technical things any console has achieved. It's only a few weeks until the big Nintendo Switch 2 event on 2 April, when we'll learn more about what this next console can actually do. Given that this is Nintendo, I'd be surprised if internet-based game streaming was a part of the new console's offering; Nintendo tends to favour older, proven technology over risky bets. Eight years is a long time for Nintendo's competitors to have perfected an alternative untethered gaming solution, and nobody has yet done it. Perhaps it's just not possible; no wonder the Switch 2 is sticking to what works. From the makers of co-op divorce platformer It Takes Two – which unexpectedly, sold 23m copies, a figure that publishers would do well to remember in this age of safe bets – Split Fiction is an ambitious and gently silly game about two authors who are forced to inhabit each other's stories. Sci-fi writer Mio and fantasy writer Zoe turn up at a meeting at a big publishing house, only for its sinister CEO to imprison them in a futuristic idea-stealing machine. You need two players for this game, as it's entirely dependent on working together for both the puzzley and actiony bits. (Don't worry if there's a skill differential between you and your prospective co-op partner – one player can do most of the heavy lifting if required.) It's full of ideas, this, and wonderfully designed around co-operative play, whether you're playing with a friend, a partner or an older child. Available on: PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5 Estimated playtime: 15 hours Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is back, again. The third and fourth entries in the series are being remastered by Activision, and will be out in the summer. Activision ran a bunch of horrible AI-art ads on Instagram last weekend for games that don't actually exist. The ads link to surveys presumably intended to gauge interest in the fake games, but instead all everyone's talking about is why the band in Guitar Hero Mobile has four guitarists, no singer and a phantom drummer. Rockstar has bought an Australian studio run by Brendan McNamara, the director of the 2011 detective drama game LA Noire, which was also published by Rockstar. His previous studio, Team Bondi, closed down shortly after LA Noire ended its protracted development, after former employees called out an allegedly toxic, oppressive, crunch-heavy work culture led by McNamara. Games industry analyst Mat Piscatella ran the numbers and found that 40% of all the time spent gaming in the US in January was spent playing the same 10 live service games, most of which are years old. It paints a bleak picture for any developer trying to break into this space. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion When video game age ratings go wrong Typewriters, stinky carpets and crazy press trips: what it was like working on video game mags in the 1980s Ghost hunting, pornography and interactive art: the weird afterlife of Xbox Kinect James Bond by Amazon wouldn't be a bad thing – if we finally got a true successor to GoldenEye 007 | Dominik Diamond Monster Hunter Wilds – prepare for the most epic fight of your life | ★★★★★ The 15 best games to play on the Nintendo Switch in 2025 I got something wrong in last week's Question Block answer: Doug wrote in to say that the Nintendo Switch does now have a YouTube app, though happily he says the parental controls are good enough to stop his 11- and 8-year-old kids from constantly redownloading it. As for this week's question, it comes courtesy of reader Emily: 'What games did you previously love that you wouldn't enjoy playing today?' I really had to think about this one. I'm sure we can all immediately think of a TV show we enjoyed as teenagers that we find deeply embarrassing now (*cough* Family Guy *cough*) – but we tend to make excuses for the games we adored when we were young, even if our tastes have changed massively since then. I would have talked your ear off about how great Shenmue was as a teenager, because everything it did was new at the time. Now, even if you ignore the technological advances that have made realistic-looking game worlds standards, the sheer cringeworthy thinness of the plot and characters make it harder to love. I adored a lot of JRPGs, from Skies of Arcadia to Dragon Quest, that I simply wouldn't be able to enjoy now due to their slow pace (and the interminable repetitive random battles). Also, in the 00s we all gave a lot of games a pass for being technically interesting or ambitious, when they were also juvenile and/or sexist. I'm thinking especially of 2005's Indigo Prophecy here (Fahrenheit in the US), a game that was certainly interesting but also rife with racial and gender stereotyping that made me want to cringe myself inside out when I replayed it a few years later. I remember defending an obscure Japanese horror-ish game that put all the female characters into a strip-club room as a reward for finishing the game, because it was otherwise novel. These days, with the benefit of age and experience, my tolerance for casual sexism is basically zero – and quite a few games in my PS2-era collection would now be more difficult to enjoy. If you've got a question for Question Block email us on pushingbuttons@
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Monster Hunter Wilds Devs Are Fixing A Game-Breaking Bug While PC Players Edit File Typos Because Of Bad Performance
Monster Hunter Wilds continued its massive launch into the weekend with the second-most players on Steam, helping propel the Valve-owned storefront to a new record-breaking 40 million concurrent users. The action-RPG's performance on PC, however, has remained somewhere between less than stellar and pretty bad, devolving on rare occasion into complete low-poly horror. Capcom also recently confirmed it's working to fix a game-breaking bug late in Monster Hunter Wilds that can prevent players from beating it. That bug occurs pretty late after the credits roll following the 'main' campaign, but before all the story quests have been completed. It revolves around an NPC not appearing, an issue that ends up disabling story progression for the main mission in Chapter 5-2 A World Turned Upside Down. The good news is that a fix is already on the way and will arrive on March 4. It'll also address problems preventing some players from accessing the 'Ingredient Center' and 'Grill a Meal' features. What's less clear is when Capcom will be able to address deeper issues on PC where players are experiencing everything from framerate stuttering to frequent crashes. The game's subreddit and Steam discussion pages have been full of players looking for workarounds, mods that might help, or any other tip for making the game run better on their PCs. Fans have been so impatient that they've even turned to editing game files to see if it helps. A Steam user who goes by BeepBoop discovered over the weekend that the Monster Hunter Wilds config file on PC includes a strange typo. 'Resolution' is spelt 'Resoltuion' instead. So they went through and corrected every instance of it. 'This gave me a very nice boost as well, but make sure to watch your temps,' they wrote. 'It made my processor temp jump significantly (50C to 70C).' A player who shared the discovery on Reddit reported similar success. They said their framerate jumped from 120 to 140 afterwards. 'Again, maybe a coincidence but I have no idea, needs more testing,' they wrote on the Monster Hunter subreddit. 'I'm just happy to gain FPS somehow.' Players were immediately skeptical that such a small thing would be responsible for some of the game's performance issues. Others were willing to try anyway, with claims of mixed results. PC gaming is as much witchcraft as science. What makes this 'fix' more of a placebo than a legit workaround, though, is that players discovered the typos kept coming back after launching the game. Plus, 'Resoltuion' apparently appears in Monster Hunter Wilds' executable file as well. So no, going full spell-check on the action-RPG probably isn't boosting anyone's performance on PC. But you can't blame some folks for trying, especially if their version of the game looks like this. Capcom has provided a list of known issues and troubleshooting advice but hasn't yet laid out a timeline for a bigger update to overhaul Monster Hunter Wilds' optimization on PC. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Monster Hunter Wilds Looks Very Washed Out But Changing These Settings Can Help
Monster Hunter Wilds can be a very pretty game, full of lush detail and deep colors. It can also look like greyscale goop. There are reasons for this, and ways to try and get around it. Here are the settings I recommend changing immediately, not just for a pretty Monster Hunter Wilds experience, but also a better one overall (these recommendations are primarily for playing on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S). See Monster Hunter Wilds on CDKeys - G/O Media may get a commission Seriously, it'll be all right, I promise. Monster Hunter Wilds is normally very bright and dull looking. Games always ask you to calibrate this before playing by making you play a little watermark-balancing mini-game, but I found that baseline to be wildly over-tuned. Turning the first two brightness sliders all the way down and keeping the third slider where it would normally be helped up the contrast for me and cut down on the sludge graphics, at least a little bit. This setting isn't in the game but specific to whatever display you're using. I jacked up the saturation and contrast to try and bring out more definition and color and that also helped. Now, if you like Monster Hunter Wilds' more washed-out look, then by all means embrace it. But these are two things you can do to help mitigate it if you choose. The game also looks way better overall during the world's daytime and when there aren't storms, so another hack is to just try to prioritize hunting during those times (unfortunately certain beasts only emerge when it's ugly out). If you play a lot of games you probably instinctively do this already. If not, here's your perennial reminder to toggle motion blur off so the game looks sharper and less blurry during combat. Monster Hunter Wilds defaults to your Palico pals speaking in English, but you can change it so they speak in their native cat tongue instead. This way they'll meow and purr at you during combat and exploration but you can still understand what they're saying thanks to subtitles. It makes the experience much more immersive. Also yay cats! Hunting monsters is hard when they're taking up the whole screen and you can barely glimpse the read of the battlefield. You can dial back the camera to show you more of the world by bumping up the camera distance up. There are definitely times when it can be fun and cinematic to have things more zoomed in, but on the whole the wider lens helps a lot. The Seikret is amazing but also loves to wonder off on its own when you don't have a next objective selected. This default for the mount to auto explore the area can be turned off so you're not constantly fighting it or confused if it's actually taking you where you want to go or just randomly wandering around for no reason. Exactly how immersive do you want to make Monster Hunter Wilds? That's a question every player has to answer for themselves. Once you have the controls down pat, especially the quick commands, you can get away with very little onscreen help. But in the beginning I recommend at the very least turning off the control scheme help in the top right corner. You'd think it would disappear on its own after the tutorial but it doesn't. Once you have your radial dial commands figured out, you can turn the item bag bar off too. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Monster Hunter Wilds Promises Stronger Bosses Are Coming After Complaints About It Being Too Easy
Ahead of its February 28 release, Capcom is already giving fans a tease of Monster Hunter Wilds' first big title update coming in early April. The free post-launch patch will include even more powerful monsters for players to hunt, a relief following pre-release worries that the game might be the easiest Monster Hunter yet. 'Prepare your gear, and resolve, hunters! TU1 will bring with it a monster of formidable strength at a level above Tempered!' Capcom revealed on Thursday. 'Another challenging monster will also await you!' The leviathan Mizutsune was previously teased as one of the first post-launch beats coming to the game. The publisher also confirmed a social hub for players to meet, communicate, and eat with one another will be added in April and available to players who have completed the game's main story. That's welcome news considering that there's currently no place to hang out with other hunters and show off cool armor and gear. The news of stronger bosses on the way is also great, considering Monster Hunter Wilds' main story can be a cake walk and even some of the post-game content doesn't feel too difficult if you're correctly prepared or rolling with a full squad of other players (or AI-controlled NPCs). reddit-thread-MHWilds-1ixaiw4 A number of early reviews of the game dinged it for how streamlined it feels compared to past entries in the action-RPG series, with some critics and longtime fans especially concerned about the lack of really challenging content even in high-rank missions. That said, as I wrote in my review earlier this week, I've still been having a blast with Monster Hunter Wilds and there's clearly plenty of room for more challenging content to arrive in the future. Plus series veterans have been through the same difficulty debate plenty of times before. I'm still cleaning up the last of the side quests in the base game and have found myself occasionally getting demolished by a particularly challenging foe like a Tempered Jin Dahaad (it was also late at night and I was starting to fall asleep, which might have been a part of it). And even when Monster Hunter Wilds isn't making me sweat, every moment has still been a joy. It's a pretty frictionless experience so far, yes, but also still an incredibly robust, refined, and meaty version of the Monster Hunter experience. It's easy to see it only getting better with time. A month after launch for the first new bosses might be a long wait for some, but it gives the average player plenty of time to get through everything Monster Hunter Wilds currently has to show them, which is a lot. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The Guardian
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Monster Hunter Wilds review – prepare for the most epic fight of your life
After riding through a desert storm on a feathered steed, dust and rain whipping around you, you arrive at a mountain pass where purple crystals frost the walls. The weather still rages outside, but it's calm within the cavern that lies at the end of the path. You can tell, from the environment, what kind of creature lives here: the Rey Dau, a horned wyvern that commands the elements. You've seen it before, when it appeared unexpectedly while you were out on another expedition, descending from lightning-streaked skies to sink its claws into an unfortunate pack of shaggy, lion-like creatures. You weren't strong enough to face it then, but you are now. Hopefully. The fight that ensues is nail-biting. You have to pull out every trick you know to wear it down, trying to dive out of the path of powerful bolts of electricity, as well as the wyvern's horns and teeth. You fire your grappling hook at a rocky outcrop hanging from the ceiling, bringing it down on the creature. You whistle for your mount, leaping from its back on to the dragon's head, clinging on and stabbing with a dagger as it tries to smash you against the walls. You are sent flying, you are fried, you are stomped upon, but you cling on and keep fighting, chugging restorative potions at every opportunity. Then an even bigger predator appears from nowhere, takes the monster you've just fought desperately for 25 minutes in its jaws and tosses it around like a rag doll. Take a good look at it: that's what you'll be fighting next. Monster Hunter Wilds' 15-hour story is a series of escalating epic battles against ever bigger and more ferocious creatures. It does not let up for a second. Within a few hours, you will have fought an awful giant spider, a sinuous sand-dragon and a disgusting, overgrown oil-chicken. Later, you will face a furious fire-ape and a dragon that shoots lightning from its face, plus particularly nasty and dangerous versions of beasts from the previous 20 years' worth of Monster Hunter games. It's quite literally all killer, no filler, a far cry from the slow and ponderous older games, in which you had to spend hours gathering mushrooms and fighting raptors before you got anywhere near a wyvern. The battles are relentlessly awesome; when a monster fell, I would let out a breath that I didn't even realise I had be holding in. No game has ever made me feel like Monster Hunter does, with the possible exception of Dark Souls and its brethren. The adrenaline of these fights, the peerless, perfectly balanced feel of the oversized weapons and the sheer viciousness and majesty of the creatures makes this game feel incomparably thrilling, even though I have been playing it in some form since I was a teenager. And it is just so much better-looking than it was back then: not just the monsters, but also their huge natural habitats, which ripple and teem with life. I must admit that towards the end of Wilds' story I felt some disappointment start to creep in. I had enjoyed nearly every one of these creature clashes, which are wrapped in dramatic, beautifully rendered cutscenes that spin a cool-looking if rather insubstantial story. But I hadn't had much of a challenge. Admittedly, I have a lot of experience with these games, but I am used to getting eaten or torn to bits a few times by a new monster before I conquer it; in the entirety of Wilds' campaign, I was knocked out only twice. It turns out, however, that Wilds' story is essentially a 15-hour interactive tutorial on what makes Monster Hunter awesome, a rollercoaster of fighting thrills presumably designed to sell newcomers on the concept and give veterans a taste of the scale and visual splendour that Capcom's modern game engine has brought to their favourite series. The real fun starts afterwards. After taking on the biggest, baddest creature I had ever seen, in the final quest of the story, I was dumped back into a base camp in the jungle and sent out to capture a small, fire-spitting raptor. I was immediately humbled; embarrassingly, it knocked me out, because I had become lazy. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion Monster Hunter isn't just about waving an enormous lance around; it's also about studying your quarry, learning its weaknesses, scouring its environment for useful plants and materials used to make potions, tools and arrow-coatings that will give you an edge in a fight. It's about teaming up with other hunters, complementing each other's play styles, as more experienced players help the rookies through. Being a friend's Monster Hunter mentor is one of the most rewarding multiplayer gaming experiences out there. This game can't be reduced to a series of fights. It is a world, an ecosystem, a community of players. You are part hunter, part nature researcher. Wilds leans too far towards frictionless fun in its story, but once I was free to explore more I started to feel more connected to the habitat. Instead of being guided by the nose – or by my ostrich-dino steed – from battle to battle I was climbing up into the canopy and scouting for creatures, getting my binoculars out, discovering hidden corners for campsites and underwater caves full of useful materials. I found I had to switch weapons more frequently, upgrade my armour, reacquaint myself with the baffling array of jewels and doodads that gave my hunter useful extra skills. You could pick Wilds up as a newcomer and have a tremendous time playing through the story. You could stop there and it would still be worth the price of admission. But I will be playing it for a long time yet. Monster Hunter Wilds is out on 28 February; £59.99
