Monster Hunter Wilds paywalls high FPS behind DLC

On-disc DLC and the like have been a scourge on hardcore gamers for a long while—but what if even optimization can be locked behind DLC? It's difficult to believe, but testing and user testimonies of Monster Hunter Wilds on PC point toward it being true although unintentional on Capcom's part. You see, Monster Hunter Wilds, despite being a premium release, is a game with its fair share of separate DLCs and microtransactions, so naturally Capcom built a DLC checking method into the game to verify what DLCs a user owns.

The problem is that this DLC checking method seems to run in the background at all times, only stopping when a user owns all of the DLC. This discovery was made by Reddit user u/de_Tylmarande on the MonsterHunter subreddit, who identified a significant performance difference between their and their friends' copy of Monster Hunter Wilds on the same laptop. The user friend's version of the game inexplicably performed better at the same settings, by about 20-30 FPS on average, and the only difference was that said friend owned all of the DLC.

To see if this performance could be replicated without sacrificing a chunk of their wallet, u/de_Tylmarande proceeded to benchmark Monster Hunter Wilds with and without a DLC Presence Check Fix mod. Without the mod, the user averaged about 25 FPS in a densely-populated village, with heights of mid-30s. In the same area, on the same settings with the mod installed, they then began averaging 50+ FPS, occasionally reaching 60 and almost never dipping below 50 FPS. From unplayable to reasonably-smooth, all from disabling a single DRM measure.

It's a bombshell of a discovery, to be sure. For their salt, u/de_Tylmarande also claims to have previously sent an FPS fix to Capcom for Dragon's Dogma 2 and not received credit for the follow-up patch, but also that the user has forwarded information of this fix to "the same person I spoke with a couple of years ago about Dragon's Dogma 2". Hopefully, a bug fix is forthcoming that, alongside Capcom's other planned optimization updates, makes Wilds a more enjoyable experience for all of its players.

Sadly, the mod in use is still in development and considered "not ready for public testing", but Tylmarande states they will continue working on it in case Capcom never ships an official fix. Other Redditors sounding off about the issue point to a similar loading bug in Grand Theft Auto V that hurt performance by parsing a large JSON file repeatedly, and if this new mod winds up being a must-have for Wilds players, it would easily end up right there with DSfix for the original Dark Souls PC release. The demonstration shows it being installed with the RE Engine-standard Fluffy Mod Manager, too, so when/if it gets a public release, setup should prove straightforward.