🎮 Monster Hunter Wilds, Marvel Rivals, and SSDs

06 Mar, 2025

So what's with PC games now demanding that they be played on an SSD drive?

For my new computer and my last one, I've used an SSD for the C drive, and then an HDD for the E. While I don't rename my C, I like to give my extra drives goofy names: usually a mythical animal followed by a container. So for this post, I'll be referring to my E drive as its "proper" name, Dragon Jar. Dragon Jar was a drive a friend won in a raffle (that I bought from him) at a LAN event that happens in a city about an hour from us. We used to go there and meet up with around 500 others just to do some indoor "camping" and play video games all night. It was fun, but then COVID happened, and I haven't been since.

All my games are stored in Dragon Jar, along with just my general files. Artwork, documents, games, etc. All in the Dragon Jar. It's never really been a problem, not even for Capcom's Monster Hunter World¹, which is similar to the design for Wilds. But in December, I started playing Marvel Rivals. Which this game did something I hadn't seen before: it demanded that it be played from an SSD. The game warns that it doesn't run properly from HDDs. Which seems a bit silly to me. There are games stored in Dragon Jar from before SSDs were on the market. Why suddenly a demand for the new drive?

Marvel Rivals

With Marvel Rivals, I assume the way this expresses itself is the pre-game loading times. With my last computer, I would often miss the pre-game character select section, and end up joining my teammates after the match had started. (I was never kicked out for this, but it sucks to do that to your team. Fortunately I only play against players when my friends are online, so they're willing to cut me slack.) I started having my Task Manager open in my second monitor so I could see what was going on, and my RAM was capping out (I believe I had 16gb? Which isn't "a lot" nowadays, but generally speaking it's enough, so I never felt the need to go higher.) When I got my new PC, the problem is technically still there, though to a lesser degree. The first match I get into takes a long time to load, but subsequent ones seem okay. The game is still running from Dragon Jar.

Monster Hunter Wilds

I saw right away when I installed the beta that it also asked to be run from an SSD. I hoped that, like with Rivals, there was some way to just get over whatever troubles I might run into. The beta itself played wonderfully and the complaints I had were mostly about setting up multiplayer with friends. However, the full game has shown me quite a few issues.

1. Misalighed Sound. This is most noticable in cutscenes and doesn't affect actual gameplay all that much, though there are still traces of it there. But when a character talks in a cutscene, the animation will play, but the sound takes a few seconds to start. If the cutscene ends before an audio clip finishes, it cuts off the audio. I'd also seen it cut off the captions early because of this.
2. Choppy Game Lag. The game, while it generally runs well, would get spikes of choppy lag that in some cases made the game unplayable. It would happen in areas that I'd already been in for some time, so it didn't make sense that it might be loading new things.
3. Waiting For Areas To Load. There's been a couple times now when heading to a new major area, that the game forces me to wait at an invisible wall while the game loads. It takes several minutes for this to finish and gives no indication that this is what's going on, as I only start to see the environment changes happen towards the end of the loading. It simply forces you to keep auto-walking forward on the seikret, stuck, unable to even look around and gather items or interact with the game in any way.
4. Slow Load Times. Similar to the other one but in general, the game is slow to load. This means either long load screens or models render into a scene as crude polygons and blotches for textures.

It's a bit baffling. My settings were set to High in most cases by default, because my machine should be able to handle it, but I gradually started lowering them to see if it helped. It didn't. I tried changing the audio settings to see if that would fix the cutscene delay. It didn't. I checked Task Manager to see if I was capping out my RAM or anything else. I wasn't.

A screenshot I took of the game struggling to render Alma correctly. I will treasure this always.

Finally, last night I moved the game from Dragon Jar to C. I'm not happy about it. But after jumping back into the game, everything seemed to be resolved. Quick load times, properly playing audio, no more lag. I'm frustrated that it means my game data for Wilds is seperate from the rest of my games, but that's an organizational issue and I guess I'll just have to deal with it. I plan to play a ton of Wilds, after all. I guess I'll cross my fingers and hope Capcom is able to sort out whatever it is that keeps the game from working properly on HDDs, but maybe it's a design choice and there's no fix coming.

I'm really not a fan of this sort of thing, especially since this isn't exactly something that's advertised before making a purchase. In the case of these two games, Rivals is free (to download) and Monster Hunter Wilds' demo did sort of give me some warning. But without upgrading to a new PC, my last one didn't have the space on the C drive for any games to be moved over.

Notes

#2025 #marvel-rivals #monster-hunter #video-games