Monster Hunter Wilds shipped its final free update. The rebound data says partial credit
Recent Steam reviews have settled near 71 percent positive, the friendliest window since launch, while the all-time rating is still Mixed just under 50 percent.
Monster Hunter Wilds is finished with major free updates. Capcom shut down its own feedback hub in February, calling Ver.1.041 the final game update, and everything since has been maintenance. The question this piece answers is narrower than "is the game good now". After a year of patches, did the PC reputation actually recover, and what do the numbers say about the last stretch of fixes?
Which patch counts as the final update
The version history is messier than the marketing. Title Update 4, released in December 2025 with Gogmazios, was the last major content drop. A Steam-specific patch followed on January 28, 2026 (Ver.1.040.03.01): a new CPU settings tab, shader warm-up reductions, texture streaming and VRAM adjustments, and a texture pack rebuild that cut the download by about 45 GB. Ver.1.041 arrived on February 18, 2026 with arch-tempered Arkveld as a permanent event quest, 10-star arch-tempered quests for four monsters, and the largest CPU/GPU load-cutting pass of the year. Capcom's feedback report page labels Ver.1.041 "the final game update" and stopped accepting tracked feedback after it.
Two details often get misattributed. The DirectStorage upgrade on Steam shipped back in Title Update 1, April 2025, alongside the first VRAM reduction; it predates this final stretch by ten months. And the stutter mitigation for the "frame rate cap plus DLSS" combination landed in Ver.1.042.00.00 on August 4, 2026, which is a maintenance patch: demo save transfer, offline event quests, and that one fix.
So "the final free update" is really a three-month window from late January to late February 2026, with an August coda.
The review curve, in two numbers
Steam's all-time rating for Wilds is still Mixed. Trackers put it between 49.7 and 49.9 percent positive across roughly 334,800 reviews as of November 2 to 5, 2026 (SteamPeaks: 49.7 percent of 333,100; megalode's Steam API capture on November 5: 49.9 percent of 334,857). That number is arithmetic, not sentiment. It averages in the launch-era reviews, and with 335,000 of them already banked it will sit near 50 percent for years no matter what Capcom does next.
The live signal is the recent window, and there the move is real. The last 30 days run about 71 to 72 percent positive: 70.7 percent per SteamPeaks (snapshot November 2) and 71.9 percent from 2,766 reviews in the last 29 days per SteamPlayerStats (captured November 5). Steam currently labels recent reviews Mostly Positive. For context, VideoGamesCritic's sample of 412 recent and most-helpful reviews finds performance is the single most mentioned topic in positive reviews at 19 percent, while negative reviews still lead with bugs and crashes (29 percent) and performance (28 percent). Players who stayed are crediting the fixes; the complaints have narrowed rather than disappeared.
We timestamp tracker captures because these percentages move daily; our policy on that is in the methodology.
Player counts: a bump, then a slide
The concurrent-player curve agrees that early 2026 was the high-water mark. SteamPeaks' monthly peaks show 65,231 in January, then 85,505 in February, when the Steam-specific patch and Ver.1.041 landed. That is the "back to 80,000" rebound, and gmcharts' independent tracking puts the same February peak at 77,953, so call it roughly 78,000 to 85,000 depending on the sampler. March held at 71,918.
It did not hold. The monthly peak slid to 26,984 by August, spiked to 63,386 in September during the game's first 25 percent discount (the $29.99 low was observed September 10), and has fallen since: 50,476 in October, 31,828 in November to date. The all-time record remains 1,384,608 concurrent players from March 2025, per SteamDB. The final-update bump was real, and the population it attracted mostly did not stick. Correlation, too: player peaks track sales and discounts as much as patch quality, so read the February number as a ceiling, not a verdict.
Promises versus what players report
Capcom's January and February notes promised over 100 individual processing reductions, dynamic LOD for 3D models, effect caching, optimized monster spawn processing, improved shader compilation, and lower VRAM use. Player feedback now roughly matches the direction of those claims. The recent-review window turning Mostly Positive after a launch that sat in Mostly Negative territory is the clearest aggregate evidence that the worst problems got addressed.
Our own measurements agree about the shape of the recovery. In our October audit of Ver.1.042.00.03, median frame time fell 22 percent on our test machine while the 1% low moved 5 percent, from 41 to 43 fps. Throughput was fixed; the tail hitching during zone transitions and monster enrages was left mostly in place. That matches where review complaints point now: crash and stutter reports still lead the negative column, just in smaller volume.
What we did not test
We ran no benchmarks for Ver.1.041 itself or for the August DLSS frame-cap fix. Our hardware numbers come from a single machine and a single quest in the October audit. One more gap: Capcom retired the official benchmark tool after the fourth free update because its results had drifted away from real in-game performance, so public before/after numbers for the early 2026 patches are thinner than they look. Anyone quoting exact fps gains for Ver.1.041 is working from community samples, and so are we.
Where the PC version stands
The aggregate verdict, nine months after the last free update: sentiment recovered to the healthiest sustained level since launch, the player peak doubled off its January low and then faded, and the all-time Mixed badge is permanently baked in. Capcom has moved on to a Nintendo Switch 2 port due December 4 and a large expansion the producer has compared in scale to Iceborne. That expansion launches into a fixed baseline with a smaller, more forgiving audience than the one that bought the game in February 2025. It will be judged on whether its first month looks like Wilds' did.
