Capcom has been one of the strongest supporters of the Nintendo Switch 2 so far with ports of every major release from Resident Evil Requiem to Pragmata. With Monster Hunter Wilds, which releases on December 4th, Capcom is bringing its most ambitious game yet to the handheld.
Monster Hunter Wilds already suffers from massive performance problems on all platforms, especially on PC. As Capcom works on porting the game to Nintendo Switch 2 and the game’s Ascendance campaign, the team has been pushed to introduce massive optimisations to make the game more playable.
In an interview with Kotaku, producer Genki Sunano explained that the version of Monster Hunter Wilds on Nintendo Switch 2 is not “a simple port, where the graphics or performance had merely been scaled down to make the game run on Nintendo Switch 2”.
As with every port that Capcom has done to the platform, Sunano says they don’t want to compromise the experience of the game. The game targets 30fps on the handheld with specifically optimised assets for the platform to keep every part of the game’s dense environments on screen at any given time.
“It was this painstaking, and at times seemingly endless, process of making decisions and optimisations one-by-one that proved to be one of our biggest challenges in delivering a comfortable handheld experience while preserving what makes Wilds feel like Wilds,” Sunano said.
Sunano explains that every single shader and asset in the game has been redesigned fro Switch to be “more efficient”, similar to Square Enix’s ports of Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth to the handheld. This has also helped the other versions of the game with Sunano adding that they “plan to apply the knowledge and expertise gained through this project to the performance improvements that we will be making for existing platforms”.
While the Nintendo Switch 2 is a decently powerful platform, Monster Hunter Wilds is famously a resource hog. There could have been a scuffed port of the game without these specific optimisations at a low resolution and poor texture compression, but these exhaustive efforts should result in a much better experience both for Switch 2 owners and those on other platforms.
