Conclusion

Monster Hunter: World is a solid port of the console smash hit to the PC platform. The title makes you hunt various monsters with wildly varying abilities in an open-world-like experience where have to track down the monster first. You can do this solo, or with up to three more friends in a well-implemented multiplayer experience. While the game has some World of Warcraft-like elements, it can be played completely offline, too. This of course opens the game up for cheating, which might be distracting in multiplayer games when people bring their epic gear. My recommendation is to play the game at your own pace and enjoy it, doing most of the story experience alone to learn different playstyles. Playstyles are plenty and rooted in the selection of 14 weapons that all have completely different mechanics, which will take some time to master. Overall, the game is fun, and it does have an addition factor to it thanks to the sheer endless supply of equipment upgrades you get from hunting monsters and completing side missions (which have no story attached to them though).

Graphics are alright for 2018, but certainly not top notch compared to other PC titles. Especially the textures are lower resolution than what we are used to—it looks like Capcom didn't bother to upgrade these over the console versions. The levels are incredibly beautifully crafted, with high details and good polygon counts on models.

Hardware requirements are not too demanding even at the highest setting as long as you turn off Volumetric Rendering, which comes with a huge performance hit that really isn't worth it, especially when you consider that it basically adds fog that makes seeing your surroundings a bit more difficult. Settings options are plenty, but some crucial ones are missing. For example, there is no option to adjust field of view, which isn't terrible by default, but I found myself wishing for a bit more. Motion blur is also always enabled; while not as distracting as in other titles, I'd still prefer to have an option to turn it off. Mouse and keyboard controls are excellent, no complaints here, except maybe that the default key for "special weapon action" bound to Ctrl is a bit hard to reach. I recommend you change it to Q to make your life easier.

Monster Hunter: World runs well on cards from both NVIDIA and AMD, with AMD having a slight performance advantage compared to what we're usually seeing. For example, the GTX 1060 6 GB is 8% slower than the RX 580; usually, we'd expect it to be a few percent faster. We used the game-ready drivers from both companies, so I doubt there will be any major changes to performance in the near future. It's good to see an option for unlocked frame rates so we PC gamers don't have to deal with this "30 FPS cinematic experience" BS.

Processor requirements are not terribly high as even a dual-core with HyperThreading has no problems hitting 120 FPS. The only caveat regarding processors is that you must have an FMA3-supporting CPU (Haswell and up). This seems to be caused by Denuvo and not by the game itself. Apparently, Capcom is aware of this and will address it in a future patch.

Overall, Monster Hunter: World is a refreshing change from today's typical 3D shooters and will provide tons of playtime—I'm hearing 50-60 hours at the very least. The difficulty curve ramps up nicely, with each monster getting more and more difficult, confronting you with new mechanics that you'll have to learn to evade and counter. End-game content does consist of some group events with up to 16 players, but the complexity won't be anywhere near as good as what WOW offers, for example. Still, I've been having a ton of fun with the game and can recommend it to everyone who wants a little bit of a challenge—one that isn't as frustrating as in Dark Souls.