New ‘Monster Hunter: World’ patch fixes multiplayer issues on Xbox One

#MHWorld patch update 1.03 (PS4), 1.0.0.8 (Xbox One) is now live, including general fixes to Matchmaking on Xbox One and Hunting Horn and Bounties. https://t.co/RweyKKaDFV

— Monster Hunter (@monsterhunter) February 1, 2018

Capcom designed Monster Hunter: World with cooperative monster slaying in mind. Throughout launch week, however, users joining the hunt on Xbox One were forced to brave the epic clashes solo because some key multiplayer features were not working properly.

A tweet from the official Monster Hunter account acknowledged the issues on January 27, a day after the game launched.

Hello Hunters, we’re aware of the Xbox matchmaking issues and dev team is actively investigating it, we’ll update you as soon as we can.

— Monster Hunter (@monsterhunter) January 27, 2018

An update the following day provided more details on the extent of the problems:

Hunters on Xbox One, the “Matchmake”, “Filter Search”, “Squad Session Search” and “Response to SOS” functions are currently unavailable; our dev team is currently working on a solution and we’ll provide an update as soon as it is available.

— Monster Hunter (@monsterhunter) January 29, 2018

Sadly, those four multiplayer options are vital to those who don’t have Xbox Live friends who also own the game. Matchmake helps find players to join with, filter search sets parameters based on what type of match you want to play, squad session search helps you find a squad, and response to SOS lets other hunters join you in the field when you require assistance.

It’s not an exaggeration to say the problems altered the identity of World on Xbox One. Upon loading your save file, the game asks you if you want to play a private or public session. According to Capcom, private matches still work by inputting a session ID or by inviting friends on your Xbox Live friend list. Although scrolling through the responses to Capcom’s tweets showed that even private co-op sessions didn’t seem to be working properly for all users.

PlayStation 4 players ran into their own monster hunting woes on launch day, but they were related to PSN experiencing widespread outages. All multiplayer functions currently work as intended on PlayStation 4.

While it’s still unclear why Xbox One was hit with these multiplayer frustrations, one explanation could be the lack of a beta testing period. In December, Capcom hosted an open beta exclusively on PS4. Developers often use betas to stress test multiplayer features to prepare for launch. So while Capcom likely learned a few things about the PS4 version during the beta, the game launched on Xbox One blind.

Xbox One users should be good to go now, but it never hurts to get a better grasp on playing Monster Hunter: World solo.

Update: To reflect that Xbox One online issues have been resolved.