Monster Hunter Wilds Player claims that the game runs worse on PC if you own less DLC

Despite selling ten million copies at launch, Monster Hunter Wilds was one of the biggest disappointments of 2025 for many people. The latest entry in the Monster Hunter series has PC optimization issues that persist to this day, almost a year after its release. However, one player believes they may have found a solution to the problem, and if they're right, it should be relatively easy for Capcom to do.

The problem seems to be in Monster Hunter Wild's DLC, or rather the lack of it. There are many optional paid cosmetics in Wilds. Additional content that will cost you hundreds of dollars if you buy everything. A large portion of you probably haven't purchased any additional content, and only the smallest portion of the Wilds community will have shelled out for all that the latest Monster Hunter has to offer.

Monster Hunter Player Discovers Wilds works better if you own more DLC

Therein lies the potential problem, according to de_Tylmarande. The Monster Hunter fan shared his theory on Reddit, with evidence to back it up, suggesting that it's the game looking for DLC that's at least partly why Wilds is running so poorly on PC.

de_Tylmarande created a mod that tricks Wilds into thinking you've purchased all the paid cosmetics the game has to offer. With that mod in place, the DLC running in the background checks to quickly see what you own. Without it, and with the DLC missing, the controls continue, which in theory makes the game much slower.

Family

Monster Hunter Wild's reputation is so bad that a Japanese retailer is selling it for 11 cents

At 11 cents, it really is a steal.

At least that's what this player hopes, and they've claimed that with the aforementioned mod installed, Wilds started working better for them on PC than ever before. They claim that “performance went through the roof” without any additional CPU boost, and while running Wilds in balance mode. Check out the video below comparing performance with and without their mod installed.

The player's DLC results have been sent to Capcom

They also wanted to make it very clear that even though they used a mod that tricks Wilds into thinking they own the entire DLC, the mod doesn't actually unlock anything. Everything that you usually have to pay for remains unavailable. They have also tried to discourage other monster hunters from replicating the process through fear that Capcom will catch on to what they have done and become upset.

But if what they've discovered really works, Capcom will be far from upset. Not only have they sent their findings to the Monster Hunter developers, but this isn't the first time they've discovered something that could drastically improve one of the studio's games. The Redditor has previously tinkered with Dragon's Dogma 2 in a similar fashion and sent his findings to Capcom a couple of years ago.