Monster Hunter Wilds has stormed onto the gaming scene, breaking records and dominating the Steam charts with nearly one million concurrent players at launch. Capcom’s latest entry in the Monster Hunter series amassed 987,482 simultaneous players on release day.

With this achievement, Monster Hunter Wilds has also secured the eighth spot among the most-played Steam games in history, surpassing Elden Ring (953K) and pushing New World: Aeternum out of the Top 10. When factoring in PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S players, it’s safe to say that the game has already broken the one million mark in total concurrent users.

Despite its record-breaking success, Monster Hunter Wilds has received mixed reviews on Steam, with only 40% of users rating it positively. The biggest complaints stem from optimization issues, performance problems, crashes, and bugs, all too common in AAA releases at launch. Many players also took issue with Capcom’s decision to include Denuvo DRM, blaming it for potential performance issues.

While Capcom is likely to address these problems through future updates, the rough launch has left a mark on the game’s reception. Still, the sheer number of players diving into the world of Monster Hunter Wilds proves that, despite its flaws, the game is a massive hit. Whether it will maintain this momentum depends on how quickly Capcom can smooth out the rough edges.

Behind these technical issues lies what professional reviewers describe as a spectacular evolution of the Monster Hunter formula. Wilds introduces several innovations that significantly improve the gameplay experience, including a dynamic seasonal weather system that transforms environments in real-time, a new Focus Mode that allows more precise targeting of monster parts, and a streamlined quest structure that eliminates the need to return to town between hunts.

As the BO3.gg team, we recommend waiting for Capcom's first major patch before jumping in, as the company has historically been responsive to technical feedback. PC players should also experiment with turning off features like DLSS or frame generation if they experience instability and consider disabling the in-game V-Sync in favor of their GPU's native settings.