Can I play Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam Deck? Look, we don’t blame you for wanting to try – we even gave it a crack ourselves, despite the glum outlook from the beta and official benchmark.
With Monster Hunter games having roots in the best handheld consoles of previous generations, there’s good reason why fans of the series would hold out hopes of playing the new Monster Hunter game on the go. However, with even top-range PCs struggling to run the game during the beta and on release, it always seemed highly unlikely that the humble Steam Deck would be capable of even launching it – and, sadly, it looks like we were right to be pessimistic.
Can I play Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam Deck?
Unfortunately, you can’t play Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam Deck. Well, technically you can, but you certainly won’t have a good time. Even with some substantial tinkering to the settings, you’ll be stuck with predominantly sub-20FPS performance with the game in 720P at best, and with some in-game assets failing to load correctly (or at all).
During the beta, I tried to get MH Wilds working on my Steam Deck and faced a pretty disappointing (yet hilarious) result where it simply failed to render anything beyond the menus and audio, leaving me in a void of darkness. This only got better when I opened the Hunter Profile to find a ‘Who’s that Pokémon’-esque silhouette in all its glory.
The free benchmark on Steam also looked bleak for Steam Deck owners, suggesting that the handheld PC would struggle to handle it on even the lowest settings. However, with promises from Capcom that it’s been working on optimizations to make the minimum requirements for the game a little less… intimidating, many fans had been holding out hope that the game would be Steam Deck compatible later down the line.
Sadly, with the current state of the game’s performance, it doesn’t seem likely that Monster Hunter Wilds will ever be able to run natively on the Steam Deck. However, if you really want to play it on Valve’s handheld, you may be able to stream it to your Steam Deck if you have a powerful PC and a solid local network setup. Otherwise, you may find yourself lost in the void like us.
Can I play Monster Hunter Wilds on any handheld PC?
So, we’ve established that you can’t play Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam Deck, but what about other handheld PCs? Well, the ASUS Rog Ally doesn’t fare much better than the Steam Deck, with slightly better performance but nothing truly worthy of note. My Aokzoe A1, on the other hand, couldn’t even get past the ‘compiling shaders’ screen.
However, as noted in this post by RPG Site, you can play Monster Hunter Wilds on the PlayStation Portal. This is due to the fact that the Portal streams the game, relying on the PlayStation 5 to run it, and Capcom’s use of the “full DualSense haptics experience” appears to be pretty great. However, you need a solid network connection, and should really cap the game to 60FPS when using Remote Play for the best results.
Where can I buy Monster Hunter Wilds?
Monster Hunter Wilds is available now on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S and X – and, unfortunately, it looks like those are the only platforms we’ll be able to play it on for now.
If you’re looking for something that definitely will run on your handhelds, be sure to check out our lists of the best Steam Deck games, the best Nintendo Switch games, and the best mobile games. Hopefully, even if Monster Hunter Wilds never makes any of these lists, Monster Hunter Outlanders will.