All main and side missions complete. Best MH base game in the series so far. Difficulty complaints were way overblown. The first HR fight you get into will knock your ass around. My first-timer friend has carted a ton and failed several missions through the story, and is now chewing his way through HR. He played World for 3 hours and quit because he couldn't get a grip on the systems, and felt that Wilds explained itself very well - I agree. From incorporating lore into the story - explaining what fanged beasts are and where felynes come from, etc, to numerous tutorials on everything.
Multiplayer is a little awkward. It's challenging during the story, since it mimics World's method of imprisoning the player behind cutscenes; but honestly, those fights are so short, you really don't need multiplayer unless you just really want to play the story with your friend. The longest fight I had in LR was 14:53, and that was the very last one. Most early fights were 5ish, progressively ramping up into the 10's. If you're having any trouble, just use the support hunters. Wait until the training wheels are off to play multiplayer, when you have so many less hoops to jump through. At that point, you just invite one another to your link party and okay fine. Someone posts a quest, everyone else gets a notification and you can join it right away. Easy peasy.
The story - while you hit the credits at the end of LR, there is definitely more to it through high rank and characters continue to develop all the way to the very end, and, surprisingly, I found myself invested in them.
Support hunters are shockingly good. Playing with 3 supports feels like playing with really competent real players. Olivia is constantly on the monster's face, Rosso is always getting mounts - I don't even know how he does it sometimes, and him and Alessa both are quick to use life powder if the player gets in trouble. Olivia and Rosso both drop traps regularly. Rosso will fire off armor and heal shots at the player and other supports. If you drop a trap, the support hunters will idle behind it to try to lure the monster in. They're so good.
Performance is rocky, no doubt. There are a number of mods so far that alleviate some of the issues. It's all a bandaid on cancer though, the real fixes will be up to capcpom. With my 3090 and 13900k, I have a mix of ultra/high settings, with some stuff like sky, ground tessellation, etc, turned down to lowest. Idgaf how bumpy the ground is or how detailed the clouds are if it means scraping up any more frames. I run the game at 4k with DLSS set to balanced, and capped my framerate at 45. I can achieve higher, usually 50-60 depending on what's going on, but there's an issue currently where panning the camera quickly can cause issues with the way textures are loaded. This issue is evident regardless of resolution settings. So rather than stutter constantly, I elected to cap at a stable framerate. Honestly 45 has been fine, it feels smooth enough to me.
The game is very CPU heavy, but I also suspect quite GPU heavy. There is an enormous amount of geometry being rendered at any given time. As far as I could tell, the Leaflugger ants outside of the Scarlet Forest base? They're all modeled! This is the level of detail I'm talking about here. Something that easily could have been just a flat scrolling image, they took the time to model them, and then populate the tree with them. This line of thought goes throughout the entire game. I watched a ceratonoth jump over a log that was randomly in its way. It didn't just awkwardly amble across it like I would expect any other random thing pathing over an obstacle, it was a meaningful, deliberate animation.
I love the way killed monsters don't just despawn. The corpses remain and rot until scavengers come and pick the bones clean; which you can then gather! You can traverse the entire map, all the way from the very beginning to the very last area without a single loading screen. From a design standpoint, Wilds really is the culmination of what Capcom has been striving for these last two decades. A living, breathing world of cause and effect.
The game, the design is an absolute 10 out of 10. I have a handful of observations and nitpicks that mar that score; its blemishes really do drag it down to an 8 for now.
