Update 8/7/18: After this article was originally published, a pretty serious crashing bug was discovered. Thankfully, Capcom has already patched the issue, and we haven't encountered any crashes since. You can find our full Monster Hunter: World PC review here.
Six months after its console release, we've finally got our hands on the PC version of Monster Hunter: World! Even better still, I'm happy to say that, so far, it seems to be a great port.
First off, it looks fantastic. That's helped by the fact that it doesn't have a resolution or frame rate cap – it defaults to being locked at 60fps, but that's super easy to change. The graphics options aren't overly deep, but there are enough nitty-gritty options there to tune it nicely to your system.
Here are the first 15 minutes of Monster Hunter: World running in 4K on PC:I was able to hold at least a solid 60fps at 1080p on 'Highest' settings with a GTX 1070 GPU, which is great to see. With a GTX 1080 running on 1440p, 'Highest' settings only ran around 45fps for us, but 'High' hit 60fps no problem, and some more involved tweaking could probably find a good middle ground. So while Monster Hunter World seems to be a somewhat demanding game if you want to max out its graphical options, it runs pretty great in general.
But more important than that, I haven't seen pretty much any frame dipping or hitching – it's a buttery smooth experience. Often times consistency can mean a lot more to good gameplay experience than just hitting the highest frame rate possible. I'd much rather play a game at 45fps all of the time than 60fps some of the time with drops and hitches occurring – and if you aren't trying to max out the graphics at resolutions higher than 1080p, you'll get the best of both worlds.
I was also pretty amazed by how good it feels to play with a mouse and keyboard. I was fully prepared for that control scheme to feel like garbage without a gamepad. Even though swapping between items can be a little tricky on the move, I haven't thought about switching to a controller once.
The biggest problem I've noticed with the mouse controls is the lock-on targeting system. When using it, the slightest movement of the mouse will cause you to rapidly change targets, which is a big problem when you need to click to attack. This is definitely going to need to get patched to be at all usable, but thankfully the increased mobility of a mouse over a joystick means it's easy enough to keep track of targets without the lock-on.
That all said, these are just my early impressions from playing for about four hours across a few different PCs. There could still be problems that I haven't come across yet or more widespread issues I just haven't encountered. But I'm thrilled with what I've played so far.
We’ll be updating our full review closer to the PC launch on August 9. In the meantime, be sure to watch me and IGN’s Monster Hunter expert Casey DeFreitas stream Monster Hunter: World on PC live today from 11-12pm PT right here.
Tom Marks is IGN's PC Editor and pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter.