Reports are flooding in of a variety of issues for the recent launch of Monster Hunter World: Iceborne on PC. Performance issues and crashes, and freezes too, which is funny given the name of the expansion. Or it would be if this wasn’t a $40 expansion that’s having major issues. It’s sad that the PC fanbase had to wait months for another broken launch. And yes, the original game on PC had launch problems too due to poor optimization.
First reported by VG24/7, users are encountering an issue where save data is seemingly being deleted. Upon boot, when the game goes to read local save data, an error message is displayed reading “no compatible save file found.” There seems to be underlying issue with the way the game itself handles this error, as the game doesn’t pull down the cloud-based copy of the save either, causing further issues.
If players enabled cloud saving, the game will view the error between the local and cloud data as some form of corruption, causing neither to be viewed as valid. Folks are wondering how this happened, and theories abound all across the board. According to Gosunoob, developers changed the file system for handling the save data between the launch of the original game and Monster Hunter World: Iceborne. It seems that this file type difference is causing the game to incorrectly assume the save data is corrupted on either end, and delete it for the sake of what it thinks is data protection.
Other reports are also coming in of general performance issues. The biggest of these issues is that there seem to be tons of instability and slowdowns in many areas of Monster Hunter World: Iceborne. Even in the menus, the game appears to lag for many users.
According to some users, these slowdowns are the result of a combination of anti-cheat and DRM checks. Folks are suggesting that the combination of the two techs is causing the game to overload the CPU with multiple threads and requests. It’s possible that this new anti-cheat system led to the save data issue described above as well.
This system of constant anti-cheat and DRM leads to an overloaded CPU which is much more prone to overheating. This has led to hundreds of negative reviews on Steam, with many describing the game as unplayable.
Capcom is aware of both of these issues and are working on fixes. Until then, it’s probably a good idea to back up your save data (Find the save data within the userdata section of your steam install: STEAMDRIVE:\userdata\USERID\582010/remote) backup the two SAVEDATA files by copy-pasting them somewhere outside the Steam directory.
