Today Capcom made the beta of Monster Hunter World available for pre-load on the North American and European PlayStation Store, and while you can’t actually play, it reveals a few interesting details.
When you boot up the beta, you’re asked to select the language separately between speech and text. While text only has English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese, the speech option also includes “Monster Hunter Language.”
After calibrating the brightness, we get three different graphics settings. “Prioritize Resolution” offers what it says on the tin, giving graphics a better definition. “Prioritize Framerate” will sacrifice visuals for fluidity, while “Prioritize Graphics” improves shadows and the number of objects on the screen.
These options are only available when the beta runs on PS4 Pro. They’ll most probably be available on Xbox One X as well, but the beta isn’t on Xbox One, so we can’t see that for now.
Incidentally, we can already see some of the effects of this in the start menu, which actually shows a in-engine environment from the Ancient Forest area of the game. While the differences are subtle, below you can see three screenshots in the following order: “Prioritize Resolution” -> “Prioritize Framerate” – “Prioritize Graphics”
Comparing the first with the second, we can definitely notice the better definition, and while we can’t see more objects in the third screenshots (the scene is fairly constricted, and the higher number of objects will probably be displayed further away), we do see more intense and complex shadows.
If you want to see the options for yourself, you can find a video below, recorded from my PS4 Pro. You can also check out our dedicated article about the content of the beta, and quite a few videos released by Capcom showing pretty much every aspect of the beta.
Monster Hunter World will release worldwide on January 26th, for PS4 and Xbox One, with a PC version coming at a later date. The beta will officially start tomorrow.