MHWilds: Too little, too late

This is a follow-up to my previous post.

The "endgame improvement" update, let's call it Title Update 2.5, rolled out earlier this week alongside another 20% off sale. Capcom was clearly hoping for a win. I waited until Sunday to see how the patient was doing. The diagnosis is grim. One look at the Steam chart should be enough to send Ryozo Tsujimoto into a panic room.

The update and the discount did manage to lure some players back, but it seems they didn't stick around for the party. The numbers are already bleeding out. In less than a week, during the prime gaming time of a weekend, the players who came back are already leaving. From Saturday to Sunday's peak alone, the concurrent player count dropped by 4,000. While the game may be faring better on consoles, the data we have for Steam is damning. It appears that less than half of the people who returned for the last major update, TU2, even bothered to show up for this one.

The sales data tells a similar story. Despite ranking number two on the Most Wishlisted chart and enjoying a 20% discount, the game struggled to make a real impact. The highest I saw it on the Top Sellers list this week was a paltry 48, and this wasn't a particularly busy week for new releases, just some sales for decent games. That negative 46.97% total review score has become a permanent "wait for half price" tag that no minor sale can fix.

So why the low interest? Because TU2.5 doesn't fix the core problems. The actual content of the update is exactly the kind of shallow padding I've written about before. The "new" endgame is the same tired loop, a frustrating RNG grind designed only to keep you on the treadmill. Increasing a monster's stats as difficulty is a crutch you can only use once or twice, before the players get tired of fighting the same handful of monsters. You can't fix a broken foundation by adding a new coat of paint, and players can feel it.

In this month's director's letter, Capcom was finally forced to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the severe and persistent performance problems on PC. Their grand solution? They aim to release a "fix" with the winter update, since you know, all their "fixes" has worked out so well. Lets take a moment to let that sink in. A major, game-breaking problem that has been complained about since the beta will only supposedly be fixed 8 to 9 months after the game's release. Maybe the game should have had at least another year in the oven. It might not have fixed the flawed fundamentals, but perhaps it would have launched with more content and a stable framerate. But that would get in the way of the fiscal report, wouldn't it, Capcom?