Monster Hunter Wilds‘ performance on PC has been notoriously bad going back to launch, and nobody is quite sure why. One new theory suggests part of the problem could be related to all of the game’s DLC add-ons and how it checks for them. It sounds wild, but video footage has made it one of the most convincing possibilities yet.
Yesterday, user u/de_Tylmarande published a rather lengthy post on the r/MonsterHunter subreddit titled “MH Wilds – Bad performance mystery (Solved?)” As they explain, they discovered the issue by mere chance after playing Monster Hunter Wilds through a friend’s Steam account. They immediately noticed that, even though they were using the same machine, Monster Hunter Wilds’ FPS was dramatically better when playing the game through their friend’s account than on their own.
After some testing, u/de_Tylmarande came to a bizarre conclusion: the only difference was that their friend had bought all of Monster Hunter Wilds’ downloadable content on Steam. As they explained, “on the account with no DLC I get heavy and stable FPS drops down to like 20-25 in hubs, while on the account with all DLC bought it’s 80+ FPS.”
Obviously, this claim was a little hard to believe for some users on the subreddit, so u/de_Tylmarande provided a video of themselves utilizing a custom mod they created that essentially bypasses Monster Hunter Wilds’ DLC checks. The theory has gone viral online as a result.
But the story gets even weirder, because u/de_Tylmarande revealed that this isn’t the first time they’ve discovered a performance fix for one of Capcom’s PC games. According to them, they contacted Capcom with an FPS fix for Dragon’s Dogma 2 back in 2024. They claim that fix was then incorporated into the next patch for the open-world RPG on Steam.
It’s also worth noting that Monster Hunter Wilds players on PC have felt like performance keeps getting worse with each new update. Each new update for the game also comes paired with new DLC. As of writing, 190 individual pieces of DLC are available for the game on Steam. This new theory would explain a lot.
Capcom hasn’t yet confirmed the modder’s findings or substantiated how much of the performance issues might be attributable to the DLC checks. The Reddit sleuth also made clear that they don’t think Capcom is doing any of this on purpose to incentivize players to buy DLC. “I did NOT mean Capcom did this on purpose,” de_Tylmarande wrote in an addendum. “No, no, and again no…it’s just a bug in the code they need to fix.”
No word from Capcom’s end yet on the veracity of de_Tylmarande’s findings, but it will be interesting to see if the issue is suddenly resolved once the next patch for Monster Hunter Wilds drops on PC.
