The process of getting Monster Hunter Wilds to work on Switch 2 has not been an easy task for Capcom. While I was always confident the company could pull it off, according to a new interview with Kotaku, Capcom essentially had to rebuild Wilds to work on Nintendo’s platform rather than simply scaling down the visuals and calling it a day.
Speaking with the outlet, Wilds producer Genki Sunano said, “The Nintendo Switch 2 version of Monster Hunter Wilds was developed around the concept of delivering a natural Monster Hunter Wilds experience on Nintendo Switch 2. In other words, we didn’t want it to feel like a simple port, where the graphics or performance had merely been scaled down to make the game run on Nintendo Switch 2. Instead, our goal was to bring the Wilds experience to Nintendo Switch 2 without compromising the experience of Monster Hunter Wilds.” To achieve that, Sunano and his team had to rebuild certain assets to ensure reliable performance on Nintendo’s platform.
Sunano notes that the performance target for MH Wilds on Switch 2 is 30 fps, a feat we recently saw the game achieving in some off-screen footage. To nail this, the team evaluated the different assets and “underlying processing” behind different hunts to figure out what should be tweaked to deliver smooth performance. “It was this painstaking, and at times seemingly endless, process of making decisions and optimizations one by one that proved to be one of our biggest challenges in delivering a comfortable handheld experience while preserving what makes Wilds feel like Wilds,” Sunano says.
He explains how the team designed “more efficient implementations” of visual effects to not stress Nintendo’s console as much. This meant ensuring hit boxes, collision detection, and animation timing were consistent with other platforms. Capcom also looked at how it developed certain techniques for the previous console releases and tried to create ways for those to be more performant, which will reportedly find their way back to the other ports in time for Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance next year. All told, this extensive reworking for Switch 2 has taught the team ways it can optimize better for other platforms.
The end result should be rather enjoyable, and we won’t need to wait long to see it in action. Monster Hunter Wilds is scheduled to release for Switch 2 on December 4th, 2026.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
