Last night, Capcom opened the gates to the Monster Hunter Wilds beta on Steam, letting PC players get a preview of the next installment in giant lizard slaying. There was no shortage of eager hunters waiting for their chance: According to SteamDB, just an hour after unlocking on PC, the Wilds beta already had over 460,000 concurrent players.

As a point of comparison, SteamDB says that Monster Hunter: World’s all-time peak user count was around 334,000 shortly after its PC release in 2018. Monster Hunter: Rise, meanwhile, only capped out at 231,000 players during the launch of the Sunbreak expansion. Comparing the player counts of a free beta test with those of full, paid game releases is, I’ll admit, only so useful, but there’s clearly a lot of interest in Wilds. Half a million players don’t show up on accident.

The beta consists of two demo hunts, similar to the in-person Monster Hunter Wilds demos at Gamescom and TGS. The first, which you launch into directly after however many hours you’ve spent perfecting your hunter’s appearance in the character creator, is a tutorial quest tasking you with slaying a Chatacabra after teaching you the rudimentaries of controlling the new Seikret mounts.

The second quest has you hunting an Alpha Doshaguma, a burly, sloth-like creature that you’ll want to separate from its pack before you attempt a takedown. After completing that quest, you’re free to roam the Windward Plains region, where you can try out Wilds’ changes to Monster Hunter’s 14 weapon types. You can also freely initiate “field investigation” hunts by attacking the other monsters inhabiting the region—like its apex predator, the lightning bolt-launching Rey Dau.

At time of writing, the concurrent player count has dropped to around 215,000. Unsurprising given we’re in the middle of the workday, but it’s worth noting that many beta players have been reporting performance and graphics issues. According to a tweet from Capcom, the full game is “already in a more improved state compared to the beta test,” but we likely won’t know how substantial those improvements will be until the full Monster Hunter Wilds launch.

The Monster Hunter Wilds beta test will run until 6:59 pm PT on Sunday, November 3. The full game will release on February 28, 2025.