Capcom still wants you to pay for character edits in Monster Hunter: Wilds

Monster Hunter Wilds‘ has turned out to be a phenomenal success for Capcom already, with well over a million concurrent players enjoying the game on day one on Steam alone. Setting its many, many technical problems aside, it’s also loaded up with microtransactions both egregious and not.

This is par for the course for Capcom and Monster Hunter at large, of course. The franchise has historically proven its worth as a long-tail MTX vehicle for Capcom, and it was pretty darn unlikely that this wouldn’t happen with Monster Hunter Wilds. Doubly so, in fact, considering the state Dragon’s Dogma 2 launched in. That’s right, folks: character editing vouchers are back with a vengeance, and if you were hoping to be able to go back and recreate your hunter and/or Palico every so often, forget about it. Unless you pay with real-world money, that is.

You’ll need to pay if you want to fully edit your Monster Hunter Wilds character from the ground up

I know, I know: this is all par for the course for Monster Hunter. It’s optional stuff. Not like cosmetics, edit vouchers, and emotes make for a superior gameplay experience in a game as massive and deep as this. All the same, I’m deeply disappointed in the fact that Capcom saw fit to cram this many awful DLCs into a $70 AAA release.

Really though, for all its many, many good qualities, I cannot help but wonder if this game would be getting the rave reviews it’s been getting if it wasn’t an actual first-party Monster Hunter game.

Setting aside the frankly disgusting assortment of day one DLC for this game, I’d also like to point out that it’s a technical mess in general. Whereas Dragon’s Dogma 2‘s performance could at least be excused with its excellent graphics, Wilds doesn’t have that excuse. , however, so there’s some hope that Capcom eventually improves on this front. I’m not putting much stock in that, however. The fact of the matter is that Wilds is a poor technical showing no♐ matter how you flip it, all the while billing itself as a $70 AAA title that’s loaded with microtransactions, to boot.

In fact, now that I think of it, I’m all but certain that a bunch of people actually are buying character edit vouchers in Capcom titles. If they weren’t, the option wouldn’t be so pervasive in almost every one of the company’s RPG titles. And for sure, you definitely can edit a substantial number of options on your character even without a voucher, but the fact remains that Capcom is painfully eager to monetize such an easy and obvious quality-of-life feature across its catalog.

Monster Hunter Wilds is a good game, no two ways about it. It’s not beyond critique, however, and after reading so many glowing reviews about the title I simply expected more from it in almost every way. . We’re free to ignore Capcom’s handling of microtransactions, and I believe it won’t be too hard to side-step a large chunk of it, but it all still rubs me the wrong way. And I don’t think I’m the only one, either.