It was very good. The seikret riding mechanics are about as good as can be hoped for, the focus/wound system feels better than the clutch claw while being more grounded than Rise’s gimmick, and the map feels more vibrant and alive than even MHWorld’s maps instead of just being a few little arenas like in Rise.
The performance was ok for me, but it was maxing out both my CPU and GPU and I got an irrecoverable hard GPU crash once which required a hard reboot and made me sit through it compiling shaders for ten minutes again. It does not look nearly visually good enough for how demanding it is, although it does look pretty good; it’s like a slightly higher definition MHWorld without the shitty TAA and overly aggressive bloom. The framegen it wanted to run by default was both unnecessary and created awful ghosting in a way I’ve never seen anything do before.
A ryzen 5 7600 and an RX 6800. I didn’t mess with the settings too much and just let it default them to medium, but I turned off motion blur, framegen, and bloom and turned up texture resolution, upscaling quality, and fur/hair quality without any issues. Except the one crash, which may have been caused by adrenalin wanting to force enable its own extra bullshit and me not thinking to check and turn that off until afterwards.
Apparently there’s already further performance patches in the main fork that have been added to the benchmark tool, but which weren’t in the open beta fork, so you could try the benchmark from the store page. There’s another open beta in a few days so you could try it then: they’ve apparently got it set to just autoaccept beta requests and it doesn’t require owning the game to try. It is apparently not going to be patched to have the performance fixes, though.
Thanks for the thorough report. I’ll try and play the next beta for a bit. I have a 7800X3D and 7800XT so it should be slightly better for me but who knows with modern “optimization”.