When is Monster Hunter Rise coming to PC?
Monster Hunter Rise is out—but only on the Nintendo Switch, for now. 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. The big question is: When?
Capcom has confirmed Monster Hunter Rise will come to PC, just like World before it. But it's going to be a long wait. Here's everything we know about the PC version of Monster Hunter Rise.
What is the Monster Hunter Rise PC release date?
In a February interview, Capcom said that Monster Hunter Rise is coming to PC in early 2022, and right now is "still very much in development."
That's a big gap. 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. If Rise releases on PC in early 2022, that's at least 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 kind of PC features will Monster Hunter Rise have?
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.
For Rise, Capcom will have to give that treatment to the whole game. Today's PCs are vastly more powerful than the Nintendo Switch, and Rise was optimized to look good at the Switch's handheld 720p or docked 1080p (and it actually runs at 960x540 or 1344×756 before being upscaled). How well will that translate to a PC release built to run at up to 4K?
I'm optimistic that Rise will actually look great on PC. Like Monster Hunter: World, Rise is built on Capcom's RE Engine, which it's also used for Resident Evil 7 and the RE2 and RE3 remakes. Capcom has proven how adaptable the RE Engine is over the last few years, and it would make sense for all of Rise's assets to be created with an eventual higher fidelity PC release in mind.
Leaks from last November showed that Capcom was already planning to ensure Rise was coded with future mouse/keyboard customization and UI navigation in mind, as well as uncapped framerates and resolutions higher than 1080p. The leaks also mention some of the graphical features to expect in a PC release: Texture filtering, anti-aliasing, V-Sync options, anisotropic filtering, and fullscreen/windowed/borderless options. That's all pretty standard stuff, but the leak also mentions 21:9 ultrawide support, which is a nice premium touch.
None of this is surprising for a PC game being developed in 2020, 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. And hopefully, it'll launch with all the updates Capcom has planned for Rise on the Switch over the next year.