Buggy monsters in Monster Hunter Wilds have sparked a wave of low-poly animal adoration

rockpapershotgun.com:

I've spent quite a lot of today trying to figure out why, exactly, some of the monsters in the Monster Hunter Wilds beta looked like bundles of copulating pyramids slathered in crocodile gravy. Nic clued me in on this reddit thread earlier, which cites unnamed Chinese players who've allegedly data-mined the beta's monster models, and learned that they are extremely large, encompassing hundreds of thousands of polygons.

If every monster in Monster Hunter Wilds were that fancy all of the time, your computer would become a volcano. As such, the game resorts to loading-on-demand systems to ensure that you only see those gorgeous details when the monsters are close by and, as the case may be, angrily sitting on you. When they're further afield, the flourishes fall away to free up memory and processing power. The popular Redditor explanation for the presence of monsters that look like Henry Moore sculpture is basically that the LOD systems are being forgetful, and neglecting to load the additional polygons at proximity.

All this comes with the severe caveat that we are talking about somebody's patchy translation of amateur tech breakdowns that may have been totally fabricated. Capcom ain't talking either. But the explanation is consistent with what I dimly understand of memory management in other video games. More importantly, the low poly monsters are just extremely good fun.

It isn't particularly novel to argue that Actually, video games are more visually intriguing when you boil away a lot of detail and geometry. I did a feature about low-spec graphics for PCGamer back in the day, and have also written in glowing terms about PS1 demakes of triple-A games, together with arsey reverse-historical commentaries on Silent Hill 2. So I won't belabour the point this time. Fortunately, I have other people to belabour it for me.

The beta's jigsaw-dinosaurs have sparked a wave of enthusiasm on Twitter, one of those little trends that makes you think ah, maybe Twitter ain't so bad