Poor PC performance and a small monster roster were two of the issues our reviewer had with Koei Tecmo's Monster Hunter-like game, Wild Hearts, and [[link]] the latest patch seeks to make some progress in both areas. Today's update adds a new monster, "the dangerous Murakumo," and according to director Takuto Edagawa, will improve performance for "some CPUs."
The update also adds FSR support, which is AMD's rival to Nvidia's DLSS. Both work by rendering a game below screen resolution and then upscaling the images before they're displayed, ideally without a noticeable drop in quality but with a significant framerate increase. Unlike DLSS, which only works on Nvidia GPUs, FSR isn't locked to AMD cards.
"This is not limited to the PC version, but we are continuing to work on fixes for various issues, including unexpected crushes, as well as some balance adjustments," Edagawa added in an interview about the update posted on its Steam page.
The new monster, meanwhile, is a fox creature that "commands cherry petals and lightning," which is a reference to "a special term in Japanese for 'spring thunder' that conveys the arrival of spring," according to Wild Hearts' other director, Kotaro Hirata.
The performance improvements and introduction of the Murakumo are hardly the patch's extent. The full Murakumo update patch notes [[link]] are over 400-lines long. Here are just the notes about PC specific issues:
- [PC] "Tab" key has been added as the initial key setting for the Main Menu
- [PC] Added FSR to "Upscaling" options in settings to help reduce the drawing load while maintaining high resolution.
- [PC] Arrow keys on the keyboard can now also be used to select Karakuri on the info screen.
- [PC] Additional mouse buttons can now be used to assign commands.
- [PC] Removed "240" from the "FPS Limit" setting in the Preferences.
- [PC] Improved processing performance on some CPUs and GPUs.
- [PS5, PC] Fixed an issue where the mute setting in the friends list was not applied correctly when participating in online co-op.
- [PC] Fixed an issue where the player character would sometimes stop moving after a Glider or a Celestial Anchor attack with a Karakuri Staff when the FPS limit was set to 30.
- [PC] Fixed an issue where the "Cursor Movement Speed Increase" was not reflected when using the keyboard or mouse.
Removing the 240 fps limit setting seems to suggest, a bit comedically, that the idea of ever hitting 240 fps was too aspirational, but hopefully the "improved processing" and FSR support help.
The other notes are mostly very specific gameplay changes or fixes: stuff like "attacks from the Training Bear Karakuri will no longer hit tsukumo" and "fixed an issue where it was sometimes not possible to drink Healing Water while dodging." There are also some quality of life improvements that sound like they'll be pretty meaningful. The first change listed is a good example: "Added a 'Camera Distance' setting that allows the player to adjust the in-combat distance of the player character and the camera."
Wild Hearts costs $70 on Steam, where it currently has a "mixed" user review average. We'll see if this patch improves that overall assessment—Wes did say in his Wild Hearts review that the combat is "sublime," despite the other problems.