Wild Hearts dev pledges performance improvements following early access criticism

eurogamer.net:

Wild Hearts developer Omega Force has pledged to address performance issues reported by players taking advantage of EA's 10-hour early access offer ahead of this Friday's release.

Wild Hearts is, of course, Omega Force and publisher EA's spin on Monster Hunter, setting players loose in the land of Azuma, a kind of fantastical feudal Japan, to bring down mighty Kemono, behemoths fused with nature. EA Play subscribers on all platforms have been able to access the game's first ten hours of play since yesterday, but early reports have pointed to disappointing performance and visual concerns, especially on PC.

PC players have reported the likes of lower-than-anticipated performance even on hardware well above EA's recommended specs, as well persistent stutter regardless of settings and resolution. I've been playing the Origin version with a RTX 3070 for review, and have experienced both issues first hand.

In response to these early concerns, Omega Force has now shared a statement saying it's «working continuously to improve performance and optimise the game for a wide variety of hardware specs across future updates», and that a patch will arrive for PC next week addressing a CPU bottleneck problem the team has discovered. This, it says, should should «improve performance across mid-high end CPUs».

The developer also notes it'll be introducing DLSS and FSR support will be introduced in a future patch, and encourages anyone experiencing «significant performance issues despite running recommend or higher specs» to submit details to EA's support team.

As a long-time Monster Hunter player, Wild Hearts has thoroughly caught me by surprise, and I've loved my time with it so far — although that's probably about as much as I can say