Over the course of a four hour session, I saw about one crash an hour. Worse, when a crash occurs during a hunt, you lose all progress since the last save. Monster Hunter: World automatically saves after missions, but any significant crafting or item management between hunts goes down the tube. Quick load times are something of a salve, but hopping back into a multiplayer hunt after a crash after too much time disqualifies you for rewards attached to the quest. You'll still get to harvest the beast at the end, but no bonuses for you. Considering that hunts can take anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes, and that Monster Hunter: World is a game fundamentally designed around repetition, it is a devastating, unacceptable problem.

After a few crashes, I kept task manager open on another monitor to keep find a potential bottleneck, and sure enough, my CPU usage was at 100% at the time of every crash. The rest of my hardware didn't see comparable spikes. Both my PCs meet the minimum and recommended spec for Monster Hunter: World, and run smoothly otherwise, so I hesitate to blame hardware outright. I get the impression this is simple bug, as catastrophic as it seems. Multiplayer hunts might increase the chances of a crash, as it happened more frequently and on both ends in sessions with friends, but I've experienced them in offline sessions, too.