Within the final days of 2025 and well into the first days of 2026, Monster Hunter Wilds has been showing some weird glitches on PC. Players on Steam quickly came up with a theory that states that the game gets progressively worse all around if you have any DLC installed, then an updated theory said it gets better the more DLC you have.
Digital Foundry has done its usual sleuthing and found out that neither is the case. What they also found out, though, was even bonkers: while the glitches are not caused by “having DLC”, they’re all caused by something DLC-related — and the culprit is the game itself.
Fortunately, there is a workaround — which is cool, since Monster Hunter Wilds is one hell of a game, well received critically and by users, with some epic battles to boot.
Monster Hunter Wilds performance bugs kickstart the trend of weird stuff in gaming for the year
Like we said, PC players have been facing many issues with Monster Hunter Wilds: game jittering, bad loading, sound issues. None of them are really game-breaking, but one of the perks of being PC-first players is the ability to play with maxed out settings — depending on your rig’s specs, of course.
So you’ll understand if the keyboard-and-mouse crowd might seem slightly ticked off by this. I mean, what do you want from them? Play on a console? The gall!
As it turns out, the reality behind the game’s performance stutters is even more head-scratching, as the root of the problem isn’t the DLC itself, but rather how the game obsessively checks for it.
According to recent reports, when players are in the hub area near the Support Desk Felynes, the game triggers an automatic DLC check.
And “check” it will. Thousands upon thousands of times, for no reason at all, like a very insecure person who thinks you’re lying or cheating all the time and decides to “test” you. I may or may not be speaking from experience.
Digressing aside, this constant checking creates a massive bottleneck on the game’s overall performance for a few reasons:
- CPU Overload: The game is already demanding on your hardware, and these constant, redundant checks add a significant load to an already over-burdened processor.
- It Affects Everyone: You don’t even need to own extra content to feel the lag. The game constantly searches for DLC regardless of your library, meaning the slowdown happens even if there is no DLC to be found.
- Location Specific: This specific glitch is tied to the recurring checks triggered near the Support Desk in the hub.
While Capcom previously promised that a winter update would address the major issues plaguing the PC version, many of these performance problems still persist.
Fortunately, the community hasn’t stayed idle, as modders have already released a “less DLC checks” mod designed to alleviate this specific CPU strain by stopping the game from constantly polling for content. It isn’t a total fix, of course, but at least it will ease up on your PC’s processing power, effectively making the game tolerable for a very demanding demographic.
So, if your frame rate is tanking near the Felynes, just know it’s not because you haven’t bought enough outfits—it’s because the game is looking for them way too hard.
