[STEAM] Capcom is selling Monster Hunter Wilds with the energy of a man paddling up a waterfall: new 26GB demo lets you play the prologue for free after price drop to $40

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Monster Hunter Wilds has a new and sizable free demo out to help onboard players ahead of the release of the game's Ascendance DLC.

The roughly 26GB Monster Hunter Wilds prologue demo, which includes the character creator and single-player content up to chapter 1-3 according to a Steam

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from Capcom, comes on the heels of

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. Monster Hunter Wilds is now $40 at base, and Capcom's also cobbled together some cheaper ways to buy the mountain of DLC released for the game.

Progress in the demo will carry over to the full version if you do choose to buy it. The only catch is that online play and photo mode aren't available in the demo, though you likely won't be needing help from friends for early-game monsters – and if you do want some assistance, you can presumably rely on NPC hunters to fill out your squad.

Between the price drop, discounted DLC, and now this demo, Capcom is working overtime to paper over Monster Hunter Wilds' rough launch year and bolster the player base ahead of the release of Ascendance, an expansion comparable to Monster Hunter World's Iceborne or Monster Hunter Rise's Sunbreak.

With Ascendance, Capcom is basically releasing the second half of the game, with new monsters, story quests, and, most importantly, Master Rank gear to grind. Its release will, Capcom surely hopes, get Wilds out of

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where it's spent much of the past year, losing to many other games in the company's catalog despite being the latest installment in a marquee series, to say nothing of its record-setting but short-lived debut. (Hundreds of pieces of minor DLC were also aggressively cranked out to help pad declining sales.)

Wilds is in a much better place today than it was at launch, and as I said in our

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(of the PS5 version), the base game is and was good – but in the updates that followed, Capcom failed to address critical issues on PC for far too long, and disappointed many longtime fans with mishandled features and some strange balance decisions.

The hope,

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, is that Ascendance will deliver what Monster Hunter Wilds could've been had it not been evidently crushed by design missteps and the demands made of a publicly traded company. In the meantime, you can't beat a free sample.

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