Monster Hunter: World did a lot of wonderful things for the long-running Capcom franchise. Since the series launched on the PS2 in 2004, it’s spawned an endless array of sequels and tie-in titles that were all built around the surprisingly difficult and addictive core of hunting and slaying vicious beasts. With dozens of monsters, weapons and locales experienced over the years, fans were skeptical when the fifth mainline game in the franchise was announced at E3 2017 during the Sony press conference. The transition to a fully realized open-world game meant huge implications for the series, which had often been very sectioned off and linear.
Monster Hunter: World exploded onto the scene in 2018, with a PC launch following a short while later after the console release. Bringing an entirely new look, brand new monsters and an extremely improved gameplay loop that made progression much more sense for new players, it brought millions of gamers into the MonHun fold.
And now, the PC version is about to get even better, because Capcom is teaming up with Nvidia to roll DLSS support into Monster Hunter: World. DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is an advanced graphical rendering technique developed by Nvidia that uses a combination of dedicated computing cores with algorithms tuned by machine learning subroutines to deliver the best performance in multi-sampling graphical techniques. Mutli-sampling is equally complex and involves an application taking multiple “samples” of a pixel and comparing them to samples from surrounding elements to create a more realistic final image. By rolling the two technologies together, Nvidia has created a scenario where high resolution graphics can be rendered more efficiently, increasing FPS numbers in 2K-4K resolutions.
Check out this primer direct from Nvidia if you would like to know more.
The tech has struggled to gain widespread adoption and notice as only a tiny number of PC games even support it. The inclusion of Monster Hunter: World will give Nvidia one more title to leverage when trying to push the tech to more games, so I hope everything goes well for this run.
And with the impending launch of the Iceborne expansion later this year, hunts are getting a lot tougher. Among various new additions and changes in the expansion, a new toolset including weapons and tracking options will be added to the title. There’s also of course the new Master Rank hunts coming too.
Iceborne takes players to the frozen Hoarfrost Reach when it launches for PS4 and Xbox One on September 6, 2019. A PC release will follow this Winter.
