Capcom rebuilt Monster Hunter Wilds' assets and shaders to hit 30fps on Switch 2

Monster Hunter Wilds arrives on Switch 2 on December 4, and Capcom is framing it as a rebuild rather than a port. Producer Genki Sunano, speaking to Kotaku, said the team's target was a stable 30 frames per second in handheld mode - including during four-player hunts, where Wilds is at its most demanding on every platform.

Not a scaled-down port

Sunano was explicit about what Capcom was trying to avoid. "We didn't want it to feel like a simple port, where the graphics or performance had merely been scaled down to make the game run on Nintendo Switch 2," he said. Instead the team rebuilt individual assets and shaders with more efficient implementations, trying to keep the original look while cutting the cost of producing it.

That meant going back over parts of the game that had already been optimised once for other platforms and finding cheaper ways to achieve the same visual result. Sunano called it "this painstaking, and at times seemingly endless, process of making decisions and optimizations one by one" and named it one of the port's biggest challenges.

Keeping the hitboxes honest

The more interesting technical detail is what Capcom would not let itself change. Where visual effects were reworked, they had to stay aligned with the existing hitboxes and collision detection, so a swing that connects on PS5 connects the same way on Switch 2. In a game where players learn monster attacks frame by frame, a port that quietly shifted those windows would have been a different game.

Why it matters

Wilds is one of the heaviest games Capcom has ever shipped, and its PC launch performance was the single biggest complaint against it. Getting it running at a locked 30 in handheld is a real test of what the RE Engine can do on Switch 2 - and of whether the Ascendance expansion, due on Switch 2 in 2027, has room to grow there.