Monster Hunter Wilds Beta on the Steam Deck

By pure coincidence, I happened to check the “News” section of the Steam Deck main page last night, and saw:

“Monster Hunter Wilds Open Beta Test – Introductory Guide”

WHAT?!

Some hasty reading revealed that not only was MH Wilds doing a public beta, it was already ready for download and all I needed to do was press a button on Steam to “apply” for access (really it was just an automated sign-up/check kinda thing; I got access immediately).

I have over 200 hours in what I would consider its predecessor – Monster Hunter World – so Wilds has been a game I have been looking forward to a lot (Rise just didn’t quite scratch the same itch). I didn’t realise just how much I had been looking forward to this until I was legitimately giddy watching the download go ^^

Unfortunately, yesterday was Thursday, meaning today is Friday, not the weekend, and so I had to wait until after work to try it out.

My Steam Deck is my main gaming machine these days, I haven’t had time nor budget to build a desktop PC, so I was somewhat worried about whether the beta would even run:

1. MH Wilds recommends turning on AI Frame Generation, even for 1080p 60fps! The Steam Deck is very nice and convenient, but a graphics powerhouse it is not…
2. The Steam Deck runs Linux. Although Valve has done borderline miraculous things with respect to compatibility layers and interop between Windows games and their little Linux box, we are talking about the beta version of a PS5 game ported to PC assumed to be running Windows. I was asking a lot of several brittle moving parts here, and fully expected to be disappointed.

I am so happy I was wrong! The game just worked (!!) out of the box. Download the ~29GB; click “Play”; game UI loads (I’d already made it further than I thought I would); watch the shaders compile for a while (which was where other Linux users had reported problems); shaders compiled successfully (could this be actually working??); and camera, lights, action! Well. Almost. Turns out even though I had said “no” to enabling frame generation, the graphics settings still had it turned on, and the Steam Deck doesn’t support frame generation as far as I know. But the menus were running, just not with a game preview as the background, so I could navigate to the right setting and change it to “Off” myself.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got graphical backgrounds on the menus!

1½ hours later, I’d made a character (relatively quick, I know ^^) and started playing the introductory campaign. Does it run? Yes! Amazingly? No, it’s the Steam Deck. But it does run! I got ~16-20 fps stable in the environment, occasionally maybe dipping down to 10 during fights, but no “slide show” stutters which prevented me from reacting, it always ran smoothly (for a suitable definition of that word). I also did not experience any flickering of the whole image, something other Linux users had reported, so overall I consider this a massive success! Sure, the visuals are all set to either “off”, “low”, or “lowest” (yep, there’s one worse setting for some of them ^^;;) but hey, it actually runs!

I really can’t emphasise enough just how amazing it is that this runs! 8 years ago, when I first started dabbling in Linux, running games via compatibility layers was a “mostly okay if you’re lucky, spend some time with the right magic config files, and others have it working” situation. And that was for released games, forget about the open beta of an upcoming AAA title with online multiplayer! The fact that I can just download this, on what is effectively a Linux console, and it just works, is nothing short of amazing, and shows just how much incredible work Valve has invested in not just the Steam Deck, but Linux compatibility layers as a whole.

The gameplay itself (there is only ~1-2 hours in the beta, which is fair enough) seemed interesting. There are some changes from World such as mounts being there from the start (Rise also had this, if I recall correctly), but otherwise it is largely reminiscent. One thing that did surprise me was that there is no “Monster Hunter Language” option, and you have to choose to have your palico “speak” in cat voice (by default it is set to speak words, same as the other NPCs). I think the reason for the lack of Monster Hunter Language is that the player character now speaks during cutscenes (!) rather than just grunting approvingly or sounding vaguely surprised or shocked. It could also be that it’s just something missing from the beta; time will tell.

In any case, I think it is interesting to have the voice and pitch – which can be chosen at character creation – of your player character be used in the cutscenes; I feel it adds to the immersion, even though it will never be exactly as you imagined the words or voice of your character.

I took plenty of screenshots and even some short videos of how the game looks, and what performance was like. I’ll upload those sometime over the next week, when I have time to sort through them.

Until then, take care and thank you so much for reading along! I hope this was informative and interesting : )