Monster Hunter Wilds currently rated "Overwhelmingly Negative" on Steam

I specifically held back getting this at launch due to early performance reviews. I still haven't picked it up because apparently all those same performance issues still exist or have gotten worse.

I've found if a game has performance issues at launch it's not going to get better later on, maybe slightly, but generally it's an issue that won't get fixed.
- I've not found that at all. Usually there are significant improvements in the following weeks/months. Recent examples are DOOM and SpiderMan II.
- Btw, how's Cities Skylines 2 now?
- Not in my experience. I typically don't buy AAA titles, but more smaller or indie games. If they got performance issues at launch, and there are no crashes or they were fixed, performance is the next issue getting tackled.
  Also these days there's really no excuse for buying and keeping games that aren't playable for you. There's zero reason to pre-order anyway, so just watch reviews when they release. Or test the game yourself and just refund in the refund window if it doesn't run properly. Check back after a few months (or years, depending on patience and/or size of backlog).
- I my experience, games with performance issues at launch end up not having performance issues after about a year, but everyone has already forgotten it because of the performance issues at launch.
- Uhh cyberpunk 2077
  Battlefield 4
  Cities skylines
  No man sky
  Diablo 4
  Civilization 7
  Seems like they turned the ship despite launching a broken mess.

I have a friend that was pretty much frothing at the loins about this game. He tried to convince me to preorder it, etc. I never understood the gameplay loop as it seems extremely repetitive but whatever, I'll play something if I have a friend to play with. Heard there were performance issues so held off on ordering, and told my friend to do the same. He didn't. Has done nothing but bitch and moan since launch day but won't stop playing it and obviously too late for a refund at this point. Silly fucker.

I never preorder games, but I was going to for this one until I tried the demo and saw it was buggy and laggy.
Monster Hunter is a legit awesome and addicting (in a good way) series. This latest one is a dud, but pretty much every game in the series has been a certified banger.
MH: Generations is the pinnacle of classic MH. Rise is the newest classic-style game, but it's very modernized. The modern games aren't bad, they're just different.

ok.. why?

Edited: Almost none of the things mentioned are new for either the game or how Capcom in general has pretty much always operated.

The one plus side of this whole thing is that I was made aware I needed to clear my shader cache for the game so it runs better, and after checking in game it certainly does.

The game moves on rails, doesn't encourage exploration, doesn't have any side content or freedom or sidequests until post-story..which also is lacking in content.
To make it better: the game runs terribly even on the latest hardware, matchmaking with friends is a hassle, confusing and doesn't have an online hub.. This is all a deviation from previous MH games, and some features from previous games just don’t exist in wilds.
The story and are combat fine, but the game just forces the story too much and doesn't give the player much freedom until it's finished.
Also denuvo.
- They added an online hub in the first major update but the rest is still true afaik.
Judging by the reviews,
too easy
too short
too costly
bad performance
- huh.. Well I guess you can't please everyone.
Apparently it crashes a bunch, doesn't boot at all, poorly optimised. So basically its slightly worse than the average AAA game in the modern era.
I see a whole bunch of low effort negative reviews from Chinese players that seem to be hating on Capcom. Not sure if something triggered that.
But there are also a lot of player concerns that have basically just surfaced with about 4 months into the life of the game:
bad performance and optimization continues to plague the game
constant crashes for a lot of people
too little content, and people really don’t seem to like the slow release of new contents, and wonder why aren’t they just putting em all out at once (though many big titles are trying to go for a cadenced content release cycle to keep people interested in the game, and it’s always a bit of a debate on whether that’s good or not)
story is too low effort (but MH has never really been a story-centric game; and imo the story in Wilds seem to contradict with the gameplay itself: talks about the cycle of life and the ecosystem around it, but here we are just hunting everything down)
the monsters are too easy
older players of the MH series find that the game has made itself too easy and not punishing enough: rare items are easy to get so there’s no satisfaction to be found there, builds are too shallow, etc
- A comment on your note of the story, MH has never really been about story, but it has always been about the cycle of life and the balance of the ecology or whatever. The fact that we murder entire populations of monsters nonstop has never been an issue in the +10 titles they have. Idk why people are so pissed about it now.
  It's true that the low-rank story is too railroaded, but once you are out of the long tutorial, the game does open up.

MH World currently has way more players than MH Wilds. I was personally very disappointed with Wilds and would way rather go back to previous games.