Monster Hunter Wilds can be a very pretty game, full of lush detail and deep colors. It can also look like greyscale goop. There are reasons for this, and ways to try and get around it. Here are the settings I recommend changing immediately, not just for a pretty Monster Hunter Wilds experience, but also a better one overall (these recommendations are primarily for playing on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S).
Turn that brightness slider down to 0
Seriously, it’ll be all right, I promise. Monster Hunter Wilds is normally very bright and dull looking. Games always ask you to calibrate this before playing by making you play a little watermark-balancing mini-game, but I found that baseline to be wildly over-tuned. Turning the first two brightness sliders all the way down and keeping the third slider where it would normally be helped up the contrast for me and cut down on the sludge graphics, at least a little bit.
Juice that saturation on your display
This setting isn’t in the game but specific to whatever display you’re using. I jacked up the saturation and contrast to try and bring out more definition and color and that also helped. Now, if you like Monster Hunter Wilds’ more washed-out look, then by all means embrace it. But these are two things you can do to help mitigate it if you choose. The game also looks way better overall during the world’s daytime and when there aren’t storms, so another hack is to just try to prioritize hunting during those times (unfortunately certain beasts only emerge when it’s ugly out).
Turn off motion blur
If you play a lot of games you probably instinctively do this already. If not, here’s your perennial reminder to toggle motion blur off so the game looks sharper and less blurry during combat.
Turn on Felyne Language
Monster Hunter Wilds defaults to your Palico pals speaking in English, but you can change it so they speak in their native cat tongue instead. This way they’ll meow and purr at you during combat and exploration but you can still understand what they’re saying thanks to subtitles. It makes the experience much more immersive. Also yay cats!
Boost the field of view
Hunting monsters is hard when they’re taking up the whole screen and you can barely glimpse the read of the battlefield. You can dial back the camera to show you more of the world by bumping up the camera distance up. There are definitely times when it can be fun and cinematic to have things more zoomed in, but on the whole the wider lens helps a lot.
Just say no to Seikret auto explore
The Seikret is amazing but also loves to wonder off on its own when you don’t have a next objective selected. This default for the mount to auto explore the area can be turned off so you’re not constantly fighting it or confused if it’s actually taking you where you want to go or just randomly wandering around for no reason.
Turn off some of the UI
Exactly how immersive do you want to make Monster Hunter Wilds? That’s a question every player has to answer for themselves. Once you have the controls down pat, especially the quick commands, you can get away with very little onscreen help. But in the beginning I recommend at the very least turning off the control scheme help in the top right corner. You’d think it would disappear on its own after the tutorial but it doesn’t. Once you have your radial dial commands figured out, you can turn the item bag bar off too.
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