It's been a long, hard road for Monster Hunter Wilds, but hopefully things will get a little lighter when its free Title Update 4 arrives next week on December 16. In a video published earlier today, Capcom outlined the additions coming in the final major Wilds update, including the returning elder dragon Gogmazios, new weapon and armor upgrade systems, and—crucially—improvements for the performance issues that have tarnished the game's reputation so badly that Capcom's own investors are using Wilds as shorthand for performance concerns.

Unfortunately, PC hunters will once again have to wait to see the full extent of the performance fixes Capcom has been promising since July. While Capcom says the Title Update 4 launch will implement multi-platform optimization improvements, additional performance fixes specific to the PC version won't arrive until January in a follow-up patch.

Capcom's TU4 showcase included a more detailed schedule of its planned performance and stability improvements. Title Update 4, Capcom said, will improve CPU and GPU performance on all platforms by "optimizing processing time through adjustments to frame processing, collision detection, and the number of simultaneous effects." The Title Update 4 patch will also decrease GPU/CPU load by "reducing unnecessary processes" and "implementing more than 100 processing improvements focused on players, monsters, Seikrets, Palicoes, NPCS," and more.

In January, an additional PC-focused patch will feature further CPU/GPU optimization "targeting PC-only processes," Capcom said. Hopefully the "processing optimizations" in the December and January patches address the bulk of Wilds' issues, because the rest of the outlined January additions—like "new graphics and CPU settings as well as new presets"—don't seem like they'll move the needle much if Capcom hasn't done substantial work under the hood.

Finally, Capcom said a third patch in February will bring yet more CPU/GPU optimization, and will also add "level-of-detail (LOD) quality levels to the polygon mesh for 3D models" to reduce GPU load. Wilds already seems capable of some amount of LOD transition, as anyone who's encountered its origami monsters knows. But if Capcom is manually implementing additional LOD quality levels, it might mean the existing—presumably automated—LOD transitions aren't functioning as intended.

Given how previous updates have gone, I wouldn't get too hopeful before we see whether those theoretical optimization fixes actually do the opposite. And while I'll be pleased if we finally see some respectable performance and stability improvements for Wilds, they'll be hard to swallow almost a year after the game's launch. Getting Wilds out the gate in 2025 helped secure Capcom's record profit streak—but as its long-term sales have cratered, Wilds may have left Monster Hunter's reputation on shaky ground.