Anyone interested in the latest Monster Hunter title can now jump in for free and enjoy “the opening hours of the game” with its new Prologue Demo, available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via the Steam store. It’s safe to say that Monster Hunter Wilds has had a fairly turbulent development, launching with a plethora of performance issues early last year, but that didn’t stop it from smashing player count records for the series.

Players could previously use an official free benchmark tool to test their performance in MH Wilds (we did a bunch of tests ahead of launch), but Capcom has since removed it, as it used an early build of the game. So, if you’re wondering about current-day performance, you can now use the Prologue Demo in its place to better understand how your machine handles the game.

Monster Hunter Wilds Prologue Demo is available as a free download

In an official post, Capcom recommends ‘more than 26 GB’ for the prologue, though, according to Steam, the Prologue Demo takes up 22.89 GB of space. It’s not the lightest download in the world, but it’s still a fraction of the full game; the system requirements recommend at least 75 GB.

The Prologue Demo – which includes character creation – unlocks access up until Chapter 1-3: To the Forest, which is the fifth main mission of the game. Online features and Photo Mode are not accessible in the demo, but players will get to keep their progress if they wish to upgrade to the full game in the future.

It took almost a year for Capcom to start pushing its biggest PC performance patches to Monster Hunter Wilds. They were met with great praise from fans of the game and eventually led to Steam reviews performing a U-Turn. At the time of writing, recent reviews are still mixed, but it’s still a massive improvement over the swarms of negative reviews it once had.

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Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.