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Monster Hunter Rise is out—but only on the Nintendo Switch, for now. The wait for it to arrive on PC won’t be too much longer, though. We now know that it’s coming in January 2022 with some nice upgrades to take advantage of the more powerful platform.
In the meantime, our friends at GamesRadar+ said Rise “strikes an impressively delicate balance” between the styles of classic Monster Hunter and the newer Monster Hunter: World, and I’m eager to get a feel for that combination myself when Rise hits PC.
Here’s everything we know about the PC version of Monster Hunter Rise as it stalks up on that early 2022 launch date.
What is the Monster Hunter Rise PC release date?
Monster Hunter Rise is launching for PC on January 12, 2022. Capcom previously said that Rise would arrive on PC in early 2022 and thank goodness this is just about as early as it gets.
Even so, that’s a big gap between the Switch and PC launches. For context, Monster Hunter: World released on consoles in January 2018, while the PC release was in August, about six and a half months later. When Rise releases on PC in January 2022, that’s nearly a ten month gap. Why is it taking so much longer? Leaks from late last year showed that Capcom and Nintendo had discussed exclusivity terms for Monster Hunter Rise that could’ve been a determining factor in when Rise would be announced and released for PC.
But it’s also plausible that this PC port is a whole lot more work than Monster Hunter: World.
What is Monster Hunter Rise’s gameplay like?
If you’ve been holding off on getting into Monster Hunter Rise, don’t worry. We didn’t. Rich says that if you enjoyed Monster Hunter World you should be excited for Rise to come to PC.
“Rise takes aim at almost all of the ‘boring’ bits of Monster Hunter, the bits you had to Google or just didn’t look forward to, and punts them into the sun. It introduces a dog, a malamute, as your permanent companion and mount that lets you dart across a map faster than ever. I wouldn’t call traversal in the previous games bad, exactly, but along with the new Wirebug grapple tool, Rise makes moving around its environments an absolute joy.”
“The more Rise you play, the more it has to give. You begin unlocking special moves that give each weapon’s moveset a new angle of approach, or a ten-tonne slam for when it’s needed,” Rich says. “Not only does it feel cool to bounce around the map like some combination of Tarzan and Batman, but it wasn’t long before I was using my newfound agility to maximise hunting efficiency.”
What kind of PC features will Monster Hunter Rise have?
It turns out that Capcom is actually putting quite a bit of effort into Monster Hunter Rise’s PC port and we’re thrilled. We definitely had our worries that Monster Hunter Rise could be a letdown of a PC port and it’s looking like we could stand to get our hopes up.
The PC features trailer up there for Rise answers several concerns. It will look better, thanks to 4K resolutions, high-res textures, higher frame rates, and other advanced graphics settings.
It will also support voice chat, which was one of the bummers about trying to play with friends on the Nintendo Switch. Capcom also says that Rise will have optimized keyboard and mouse controls with the ability to rebind and set shortcuts for actions.
When Capcom ported World to PC, it had a relatively easy task. That was a game built for the PS4 and Xbox One, which have x86 architectures quite similar to the PC. At launch World definitely had some issues—it was CPU intensive and the UI didn’t translate perfectly over to mouse and keyboard. A fan patch by well-known modder Kaldaien helped prevent alt-tab crashes and lightened World’s CPU load. Over time Capcom did keep patching World, polishing the PC release to a fine shine and making fixes like Kaldaien’s unnecessary.
Even with some launch issues, the PC version was a big leap over the console release. World ran at sub-30 fps on the base consoles, or around 40 fps on the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. At max settings, the PC release was difficult to run at 1080p, 60 fps on 2018 hardware, but the unlocked framerate meant powerful rigs could push the game well beyond the performance and graphics quality of the console version.
Capcom later released a high resolution texture pack for PC that really improved some blurry low-res weapon and clothing textures. It’s great to see Rise getting some of this same treatment.
None of this is surprising for a PC game being developed in 2021, but it’s still nice to see the basics we’d expect being planned in a port from the Nintendo Switch. We’ll have a long wait for Rise on PC, but when it gets here it should look like a major upgrade.
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