I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out why exactly some of the monsters in the Monster Hunter Wilds beta looked like bundles of copulating pyramids covered in crocodile sauce. He didn’t tell me anything about it this thread on Reddit previously, which cites anonymous Chinese players who allegedly combed through data on the beta’s monster models and learned that they were extremely huge, spanning hundreds of thousands of polygons.
If every monster in Monster Hunter Wilds was this fancy all the time, your computer would turn into a volcano. As such, the game uses on-demand loading systems to ensure that you only see these wonderful details when monsters are nearby and, in some cases, furious at you. When they are farther away, the squiggle falls away to free up memory and processing power. A popular explanation on Redditor for the presence of monsters that look like a Henry Moore sculpture is that LOD systems forget and neglect to load additional polygons nearby.
All of this comes with the stern caveat that we’re talking about someone’s incomplete translation of amateur technical failures that may have been completely fabricated. Capcom doesn’t say either. But the explanation is consistent with what I poorly understand about memory management in other video games. More importantly, low-poly monsters are just exceptionally good fun.
It’s not particularly novel to say that video games are actually more visually intriguing when you boil out a lot of detail and geometry. I did low spec graphics feature for PCGamer in the past, and I also wrote about it in great words PS1 outclasses triple A gamesalong with reverse historical commentaries for Silent Hill 2. So I won’t dwell on it this time. Fortunately, I have other people who will work through it for me.
The beta puzzle dinosaurs caused a wave of enthusiasm on Twitter, one of those little trends that makes you think, “Ah, maybe Twitter isn’t that bad these days,” and then you spend more than five minutes there and no, still terrible . Among complaints about optimizationthere are people trying a semi-serious low-poly menagerie taxonomy.
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There are also people who create tiny works of art as tribute.
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And there are people extending the madness to the game’s human charactersall of whose low-poly incarnations look awfully reminiscent of the PS1 classic Vagrant Story, thanks to Monster Hunter’s comparable faux-medieval aesthetic.
Examining these low-poly models is a useful exercise for armchair makers like myself, as it reveals what parts of the basic monster’s appearance the Wilds artists consider imperative for you to perceive it as a monster at all – shape, color, anatomy, texture, etc. In conclusion , I wonder if they would consider increasing the LOD errors and making them a proper feature, perhaps with some directorial commentary. But first of all, I need to know how exactly you make your luscious leather shoulder pads out of a Chatacabra that looks like a haunted box of tissue paper.
