Can I play Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam Deck? Call me naive, but I had to give it a try. I’ve been a fan of the series for over a decade at this point, having wracked up hundreds of hours in previous games across a wide range of consoles, including the Nintendo 3DS, PSP, PlayStation 4, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
With Monster Hunter games having roots in the best handheld consoles of previous generations, I can’t help but dream of playing the new mainline entry on the go. However, with even top-range PCs struggling to run the game during the beta weekends, it seemed highly unlikely that the humble Steam Deck would be capable of even launching it.
Now, Capcom has promised that it’s been working on optimizations to make the minimum requirements for the new Monster Hunter game a little less… intimidating, and has also released a benchmark that you can download for free on Steam to see whether your hardware is up to snuff for the full release.
Unfortunately, the benchmark looked bleak for Steam Deck owners, suggesting that the handheld PC would struggle to handle it on even the lowest settings. But I decided to forge on anyway, downloading the Monster Hunter Wilds beta on my Steam Deck during the final testing period that ran from February 13 to 17. How bad could it be, right?
The game spent an incredibly long time optimizing game files and compiling shaders on my Steam Deck, but it fared better than my Aokzoe A1, which consistently crashed during this phase, both with the beta and the benchmark. Maybe the glorious image of the Arkveld was just too much for it.
After around half an hour, the beta was finally ready on the Steam Deck. As I’ve already played it on PC, I should’ve immediately noticed something was up when I was treated to nothing but meows and grunts on a black screen instead of Alma, my hunter, and my palico greeting me, but I couldn’t give up just yet.
Luckily, a prompt button press brought up the usual start menu, and I selected ‘start game’ to dive back into the action. However, my beta character save data appeared over a black screen instead of footage of my hunter, palico, and seikret in the Plains. I was sensing a theme at this point.
Finally loading into the game, what I saw genuinely surprised me. The menus, map, and audio worked perfectly fine, but I found myself plunged into a pit of darkness. Everything was a blank, black screen, only punctuated by the UI and the occasional character name floating in the void. This only got better when I opened my Hunter Profile to find a ‘Who’s that Pokémon’-esque silhouette in all its glory.
Everything was set to the lowest settings, and I capped my frame rate to 30 just to be safe, but there was nothing I could do at this point. Not even frame generation could save me – after all, how could you artificially increase frames that don’t exist?
However, I did manage to use the map to navigate myself to the tent and eat a meal, which resulted in a delightful black screen with some eating ASMR and grunts that made my skin crawl. Though, honestly, I can’t say that the usual cutscene that plays on PC is much better – with those facial expressions, perhaps my Steam Deck was actually doing me a solid.
As you can probably guess by this point, there appears to be a major issue with the Steam Deck loading shaders and textures, and there are likely some compatibility issues as the beta clearly isn’t meant to be played on SteamOS.
Of course, we also know that Monster Hunter Wilds’ minimum specs are pretty darn taxing, with even my high-mid-range PC build sitting at around 40 to 50 FPS on medium settings. But I was honestly expecting the game to simply not boot, rather than… this.
Regardless, with Capcom’s promise of optimizations and the previous Monster Hunter games running like a dream on handhelds, I’m still holding out hope that we’ll be able to play Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam Deck following the full release on February 28. Don’t judge me, okay? A girl can dream.
If you’re looking for something that definitely will run on your handhelds, be sure to check out our lists of the best Steam Deck games, the best Nintendo Switch games, and the best mobile games. Hopefully, even if Monster Hunter Wilds never makes any of these lists, Monster Hunter Outlanders will.