So about a month ago, I talked about that massive leak that came from Capcom, including details on a bunch of their upcoming games – both announced and unannounced. We got more details on upcoming Resident Evil games, confirmation that The Great Ace Attorney would be released in English, and new sequels like Dragon’s Dogma 2, Street Fighter 6, and Ace Attorney 7. Also in that leak though was information on upcoming Monster Hunter games, including the soon-to-be-released Monster Hunter Rise, Monster Hunter Stories 2, and the unannounced Monster Hunter 6.
Some more stuff has come out regarding Monster Hunter Rise, so I thought I would throw together a quick video to share the exciting news. In the first leak, we learned that it will be coming to PC in October 2021 and that a Switch demo will be available in January. The Switch demo was actually just confirmed with the new trailer at The Game Awards, so that lends a lot of credibility to the rest of the stuff in the leak. In the past few days, a bunch of outlets have been reporting on some of the more technical aspects of the PC release, including stuff like FPS, resolution, and whatnot, but also on the terms of the Switch exclusivity deal.
According to info rounded up by well-known Monster Hunter World modder Asterisk Ampersand, Nintendo paid somewhere between $15 and $22 million USD to keep Rise exclusive to the Switch for a limited time. The terms of the deal involve Capcom keeping the PC version a secret for a specified number of months and then releasing it some months after that. As much as I love Capcom and Nintendo, this is a bit of anti-consumer move given that there are likely to be a lot of people purchasing a Switch just to play this game – only for those same people to be caught by a surprise PC launch just months later that will not only look better, but have better performance (which I will detail shortly).
It’s kinda the same thing we had with Octopath Traveler, which saw a superior PC release roughly a year after its original Switch release. Regardless, it is a sound business decision from Nintendo, as this is a massive franchise and will likely sell a lot of Switch consoles. And I know the Monster Hunter fanbase is probably dedicated enough that a significant chunk will double-dip and buy the game twice. Still, it would be really nice to know what platforms the game will actually be coming to instead of that just being casually revealed after it has already launched. Granted, in the case of Rise, no platform other than Switch and PC was included in the leak, so it will likely be limited to just those two.
Now onto the topic of actual technical specs – there’s a lot to unpack here. First and foremost, I do love the Switch, but I can’t deny that 30 fps just doesn’t do it for me, especially for an action-heavy series like Monster Hunter. Rise has been reported to target that very framerate on Switch, and that’s just the target – we still don’t know if that 30 fps will be constant. And of course, you have the lower resolution, but that’s just par for the course given the hardware.
But according to that same leak roundup provided by Asterisk Ampersand, PC players have a lot to look forward to with Rise. Specifically, the game is reported to have a 30 fps, 60 fps, and unlimited fps option. The game’s resolution will not be hardcoded, meaning it can run at whatever resolution you throw at it, whether that be 1080, 1440, or even 4K. There are also details on the game’s control options, specifically that it will feature full key binding and customization, with mouse input using direct input instead of analog stick emulation.
The leak goes on to describe texture filtering, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, shadow quality, and VSync options as well. And to top it all off, it even has 21:9 ultrawide support. The current Switch trailers make the game look a little bit choppy and feature a lot of low-res textures, so I’m honestly quite excited to see what the game will look like running at such high specs. If it can look anywhere near as good as Monster Hunter World on max settings, then we’re good to go.
Now unfortunately, one feature I was looking for in this leak was not mentioned: that of cross-save. Given that the game is going to get a surprise launch on PC, it would be really cool if I could transfer any Switch save over, but that may be expecting too much. Maybe this is something that will be added in the future or maybe the leak just didn’t cover it, so we’ll have to wait and see.
And as usual with such leaks, don’t take them as fact just yet. This specific one may have a ton of evidence backing it up (especially given that various parts of the first leak have now been confirmed now) but plans can change, and we should wait until this has all been confirmed by Capcom themselves (even though we may be waiting a while). Regardless, it’s enough that I’ll personally be holding off on purchasing the Switch version.
cublikefoot 