Wild Hearts’ Performance Problems Haven’t Gone Down Well On Steam

Wild Hearts
Wild Hearts

Released today, Koei Tecmo and EA’s Wild Hearts looks to provide something a little bit different to those who love games like Monster Hunter. Either together or alone, players must hunt mythical beasts imbued with the power of nature itself, which means a whole lot of stat crunching, grinding, and trying to use comically large weapons.

It’s proven to be a bit of a success as far as a PC playerbase is concerned, with the game currently dragging in 14000 concurrent players at this time of writing on Steam, which is a pretty good start for a full-price co-op game. However, the Steam reviews paint the picture of a game that’s really not been optimised for PC at all, with the game languishing on Mostly Negative reviews so far. Of the 594 reviews, only 25% are positive. Ouch.

There’s a raft of red to be seen when you check out the reviews, with most of them citing not being able to run the game when way above recommended specs, which aren’t too intense anyway. Even with everything set to low, players with high -end machines are struggling to crack 40fps, and barely even maintain 20fps. One reviewer even crack wise by saying, “the price is higher than the FPS you will be able to pull in this game”.

Other reviews point to just a generally buggy experience that gets in the way of itself, from the floaty controls to clunky hitboxes, though a lot of reviews do note that it’s a looker (when it looks right, anyway) and the fact that you can batter giant mythical pigs around. That’s always fun.

However, it’s worth noting that EA has already moved to announce a patch for these issues that will release next week, saying:

“We are very happy to see so many of you jumping in and enjoying the hunt this week! We have an update to share with you regarding some of the issues we’ve been tracking.
A patch will be released next week on all platforms that addresses several issues and contains the following changes:
  • A CPU threading issue has been fixed. We are seeing significantly improved performance on high end PC’s.
  • AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX visual artefacts fixed. Also added the option to turn off reflections in the settings menu.
  • The default resolution when launching the game for the first time will now be 1080p. We discovered many users are running higher resolutions than the recommended spec can safely support. We are adjusting the recommended spec guidance online and will continue to optimize in this area. If you are running the game comfortably at higher resolutions, you can continue to do so and select alternate resolutions from the settings menu.
  • Additional stability and bug fixes”

What makes this all slightly better too is that the game’s first ten hours are included with EA Play as a trial, so you don’t need to fork over your £60/$70 to find out if it’s even for you. And that trial will still be available after EA release next week’s much needed patch.

You may as well go and play Sayonara Wild Hearts while you wait, as it’s the superior Wild Hearts-type game apparently.

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