It’s almost ironic that Monster Hunter World: Iceborne is being affected by freezing issues. But for many of those looking to traverse the expansion’s frozen wastes, this isn’t a laughing matter. Iceborne on PC has been hampered by issues since launch, ranging from deleted saves to performance problems. While the former has been supposedly patched, the latter has been a troubling beast to slay. Yesterday’s patch may have finally subdued these wily bugs, however.
Capcom released a new patch for Iceborne on Sunday. It addressed CPU performance, frame drops, and occasional screen freezes. At least, it does in theory. Capcom released a patch on January 16 designed to stop save data from being deleted, as well as boost performance. So far, it seems that save files may have been spared the ax. But performance issues persisted, prompting players to pelt the publisher in protestation.
Iceborne has been freezing, and not in the best way.
Frozen in a frozen land
Capcom has apparently found the cause for some of the issues but doesn’t clarify. According to the patch notes, the freezes have been affecting those “with certain graphics cards.” The only clue is that it has something to do with DirectX 11. The frame rate drop has been tied to DirectX 12 and users’ particular specifications.
The patch also addresses crashes and CPU usage. Apparently, playing the game in windowed mode on remote desktop or when alt-tabbing would sometimes cause it to crash. Capcom, however, does report that the patch will improve performance, saying it “added measures to reduce CPU usage.”
Whether or not the patch fixes Monster Hunter World: Iceborne for all is still unknown. The last patch was meant to help. But hey, game design is hard. Taking a brief look at the comments section in the Steam Community post, it looks like a strong maybe. Some players are reporting that the patch is working, while others are saying it’s not. This must be the “specification” variable mentioned in the notes.
There’s a chance that Capcom will drop another patch for the outliers, but we’ll have to wait and see. Hopefully it won’t take long, or else prospecting Iceborne players may end up getting cold feet.
