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Buggy monsters in Monster Hunter Wilds have sparked a wave of low-poly animal adorationThe beauty of rough edges
The beauty of rough edges
Image credit:Zugsie
Image credit:Zugsie
I’ve spent quite a lot of today trying to figure out why, exactly, some of the monsters inthe Monster Hunter Wilds betalooked like bundles of copulating pyramids slathered in crocodile gravy. Nic clued me in onthis reddit threadearlier, which cites unnamed Chinese players who’ve allegedly data-mined the beta’s monster models, and learned that they are extremely large, encompassing hundreds of thousands of polygons.
All this comes with the severe caveat that we are talking about somebody’s patchy translation of amateur tech breakdowns that may have been totally fabricated. Capcom ain’t talking either. But the explanation is consistent with what I dimly understand of memory management in other video games. More importantly, the low poly monsters are just extremely good fun.
It isn’t particularly novel to argue that Actually, video games are more visually intriguing when you boil away a lot of detail and geometry. I dida feature about low-spec graphics for PCGamerback in the day, and have also written in glowing terms aboutPS1 demakes of triple-A games, together witharsey reverse-historical commentaries on Silent Hill 2. So I won’t belabour the point this time. Fortunately, I have other people to belabour it for me.
The beta’s jigsaw-dinosaurs have sparked a wave of enthusiasm on Twitter, one of those little trends that makes you think ah, maybe Twitter ain’t so bad these days, and then you spend longer than five minutes there, and nope, still awful. In amongstthe complaints about optimisation, there are people attempting half-serious taxonomies of the low-poly menagerie.
Monster Hunter Wilds OBT PC Low Poly Model Tier List:S - Rey Dau, a paper plane of all time.A - Chatacabra, the cube with legsB - Dogashuma, another fun cube but it’s more plumpC - Balahara, that looks far too passable to be funnypic.twitter.com/uvbkwsvOva— Project αΩ (@DzatBL)November 1, 2024
Monster Hunter Wilds OBT PC Low Poly Model Tier List:S - Rey Dau, a paper plane of all time.A - Chatacabra, the cube with legsB - Dogashuma, another fun cube but it’s more plumpC - Balahara, that looks far too passable to be funnypic.twitter.com/uvbkwsvOva
There are also people making little artworks in tribute.
モンハンローポリクイズ②pic.twitter.com/qJcCUmjXJc— 源の琉璃🦀 (@Rulia_Hermitaur)November 3, 2024
モンハンローポリクイズ②pic.twitter.com/qJcCUmjXJc
And there are peopleextending the craze to the game’s human characters, whose low poly incarnations all look awfully redolent of PS1 classic Vagrant Story, thanks toMonster Hunter’s comparable faux-medieval aesthetics.
Studying these low-poly models is a useful exercise for armchair developers like myself, inasmuch as it reveals which parts of the base monster’s appearance the Wilds artists consider essential, in order for you to perceive it as a monster at all - shape, colour, anatomy, texture, et cetera. All told, I wonder if they’d consider doubling down on the LOD glitch and making it a proper feature, perhaps with some directorial commentary. But above all, I need to know how exactly you make yourself some juicy leather pauldrons from a Chatacabra that looks like a haunted box of tissue paper.
