After playing several hours of Dauntless Early Access (both during the Founder’s Alpha and the Closed Beta), I wanted to share some of my preliminary impressions of the game for those who have not invested in Founder’s Packs. It’s important to stress that since the game is still in Closed Beta, this is not a review, and I fully expect that a fair amount of things will change between now and the game’s official launch.
To set the stage, Dauntless a monster-hunting game brought to the PC in a free-to-play format. Games in this genre tend to focus on exploration, crafting as character progression, and long fights against one AI-controlled enemy. While many games of this style can feel very confusing and overwhelming when you begin, Dauntless feels much more approachable, largely because early hunts seem designed to ease players into the game rather than immediately throwing them into the deep end of the pool. For example, players are immediately dropped onto an island post-character creation where they can learn through trial and error about gathering materials (later used for crafting gear) and locating then fighting the island’s monster. Since the first monster isn’t very difficult, this serves to help the player get a sense of the flow of the game and the combat system.
After dispatching the monster, the player is loaded into a city hub which introduces further aspects of the game, like quests, crafting, and grouping up for hunts. The game has a variety of quests that guide players along, encouraging things like killing specific monsters, collecting X number of resources, or crafting/upgrading pieces of gear. Completing these quests unlocks new Hunts or schematics at Crafter NPCs, which act as the game’s progression systems. Since there are no levels or character classes in the game, characters are completely defined by their gear: your “level” is basically how strong your gear is and your “class” depends on what weapon you choose to use. This gear is crafted with materials that players get on their hunts, some of which are specific to a particular monster and some of which can be gathered on a variety of hunting islands.
Any unlocked hunt can be accessed on a city bounty board which allows players to queue for either a solo hunt or a group hunt. If you’re already in a party, the queueing system will automatically fill out the party to the group size of four players. During my PAX East interview, it was suggested that players would be able to attempt a hunt at any number of players they wished, but that functionality does not yet appear to be in the game.
All hunts that I’ve participated in have had a time limit of 30 minutes. Each island has gathering nodes (ore, mushrooms, flowers, etc.) and critters from which players can get general resources. There is no competition between party members for these resources, as everyone can gather them the same number of times. Since the mission automatically ends once the monster is defeated, most of the hunts I’ve been on started with everyone wandering around the island for a bit gathering resources, then once someone found the monster he or she sent up a flare and waited for at least the majority of the party to gather and fight it. The 30 minute time limit was always more than enough time for this pattern of activity. Each monster I fought felt a bit different from each other, with some of them having clearly defined combat stages. Sometimes monsters would even fly or burrow away and would have to be relocated to continue the fight.
Once the monster is defeated, the screen will automatically cut to a list of all the materials you personally gathered on the mission, then transition to a spotlight of the highest damage dealer for the fight, before then moving onto a new screen where players are awarded scores and trophies for their performance. Finally, loot caches will be distributed to players (one each), of varying rarities. I’m unclear whether the rarity of the cache has anything to do with the aforementioned scores/trophies or is completely random. These caches can be opened at special unlocking devices in the city and contain crafting materials.
My experience with Monster Hunter style games is fairly slim (I’ve played a handful of hours here and there across a few), but interestingly enough, I feel like this is one of the core demographics for Dauntless. Despite struggling a little bit with the game’s controls (there’s nothing akin to auto-facing or tab-targeting, and there’s no breaking of attack animations), I found Dauntless much easier to grasp than the previous games of this style, which I think is one of Phoenix Lab’s goals with this game. Dauntless has a lot of the hallmarks of a monster-slaying game (e.g. monsters having no HP bar, fights are about learning the monster’s attack animations), but it’s packaged in a format that’s accessible to PC gamers who are veterans of other genres.
There’s one thing the game is currently lacking that would make it maximally accessible to players: tooltips and tutorials. The addition of these would really seal the deal, since even though the game’s systems are intuited easily enough with a bit of patience, some gamers may suffer a poor first impression by this lack of guidance. Since tutorials and tooltips are often one of the last things to be put into games, I very much hope that they will be added prior to launch.
My impressions of Dauntless in its Early Access form has been positive, but in an unusually distant manner. I appreciate how Phoenix Labs has brought the monster-slaying experience to the PC in a friendly format to PC gamers who may be new to the genre; despite the lack of tutorials and tooltips, it’s provided the gentlest learning curve I’ve personally experienced in the genre. Dauntless feels like it’s encouraging genre newbies to jump in and play, rather than erecting a bunch of barriers through opaque game systems. While I’m still not convinced that this is a genre for me, Dauntless has, at the very least, persuaded me to consider it, which is far more than any other game of this type has accomplished.
Since the game will be free-to-play when it launches in 2018 (open beta was recently moved to early 2018), there’s absolutely no reason for people interested in this type of game to not check it out. Between the writing of this article and its posting, a large update has already been applied to the game that tightens up combat and adds in a bunch of other quality-of-life improvements. Phoenix Labs has been consistently demonstrating that they're listening to their players and incorporating their feedback, truly crafting Dauntless into a game for its players. That's an excellent stance, making me excited to see how Dauntless will continue to evolve in the coming months.