It’s been about a month since the release of Monster Hunter Wilds at the end of February, and Capcom has begun to fulfill its promise to support the game with new content post launch. The most important thing to remember, if you’ve never played a Monster Hunter game before or are unfamiliar with game lifespans in general, is this: Title Update One is completely free. If you’ve purchased the game, you get all the content in the update for free. If you buy the game right now, when the update is out, you get it included for free. And it’s quite the spread of content.
The main face of the update is the brand-new monster: Mizutsune. First introduced to the series years ago in Monster Hunter Generations on the 3DS and most recently appeared in the previous game, Monster Hunter Rise, Mizutsune is a (quite literally) slippery leviathan class monster that utilizes a soapy lubricant it secretes to slip and slide across the ground and foul up the footing of its prey or enemies. Keep an eye out for the bubbles it breathes and the mother-of-all-pressure-washers breath attack. In addition to Mizutsune, there’s now an endgame hunt for Zoh Shia, the final boss of the story, and I highly recommend making sure your armor is all upgraded to max because the thing hits like a freight train. The set I’m running is mostly upgraded and Zoh Shia is hitting me for two-thirds of my health bar from full. Watch out for lightning. And fire.
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The brand new Title Update 1 monster Mizutsune | Credit: Courtesy -
Title Update 1 monster Mizutsune blowing a bubble to befoul the hunter | Credit: Courtesy
And the difficulty of these two monsters is evidence for the best part of this free update. Capcom is listening to its community. Fans were upset that there wasn’t a big, classic Gathering Hub where you can meet up with all your friends to prep and hang out before hunts. There’s now a Gathering Hub with all the amenities it needs: a canteen, a smithy, a stockpile, arm-wrestling, a full-on concert with an absolutely gorgeous song, and bowling with barrel bombs. Fans were upset with how “easy” the base game was, with many of them fainting only a handful of times during the entire game. Mizutsune (especially Tempered Mizutsune) and Zoh Shia have been racking up a body count like little else in the game has. They’ve promised other sought-after features in future title updates, all of which will be free. In fact, the next scheduled title update has been confirmed for summer 2025 and will be bringing back the fan-favorite Lagiacrus.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. My game’s performance has taken a hit in an already shaky game performance-wise. More prominent screen tearing, more random frame drops, connectivity errors, nearly every way the game can go wrong without hard crashing me to the desktop has increased in frequency, and I’m running on a 4070 Super and 32 gigs of RAM. Future fixes to these issues have been promised, but they have not been implemented yet. If you couldn’t run the base game, you certainly won’t be able to run it with this title update. Not yet, at least.
If you haven’t, check out my preview of the base game here for my initial thoughts after rolling credits on the story.
