

For instance, one trial takes the Behemoth Pangar, who rolls around the battlefield and freezes would-be slayers, and adds the extra threat of lightning strikes from clouds hanging overhead. There are also rotating weekly trials that add extra challenges to existing fights. Dauntless is patched every two weeks, which can introduce new weapons, Behemoths, or game modes, or it can add polish and bug fixes to previous updates. Along with giving players new ways to access the game, the Phoenix Labs team is constantly rolling out content. That just tells us that our belief that it was important to players is true.”Ĭross-play will also be incorporated into the Nintendo Switch launch planned for the end of this year and the mobile release in 2020. “We’ve seen 60-70% of all hunts played in game feature cross-platform play.
#DAUNTLESS MONSTERS FREE#
Being free to play and crossplay, letting you play with your friends regardless of what console they’re on, that’s huge,” Clifford said.

“Being free to play helps with accessibility. The game had 3 million players in May and doubled that number within the first week of console play. “We want to encourage you to stay in the throes of battle at all times,” Clifford said.Īnother big demand was cross-platform play, and building that into the game for the console launch dramatically increased Dauntless ’s popularity. But fans continued to demand ranged options until the developers relented and added them in, but with the twist that they’d be more effective if you got closer to the fray. The game is primarily focused on melee combat, which Clifford said gives the game more tension and energy than just sitting back and firing a bow and arrow. Sometimes the feedback was directly at odds with the team’s design philosophy. The goal was to give players more exposure to more content in the game and give players variety early on.” You can do things like patrols now, which are where you have a subset of Behemoths to hunt rather than a specific one. “We shifted to a bit more of an organic open-style progression, where things like beating a specific Behemoth are not as important as leveling up your gear. “In the early days of the closed beta, Dauntless was a very linear experience: fight this Behemoth, then this one, then this one in a tower of power until you get to the last one,” Clifford said.
#DAUNTLESS MONSTERS FULL#
The game has changed dramatically since the first beta, with the full progression redone two-to-three times in a way that altered the game’s questlines, story, and placement of the Behemoths that players fight. “Everything that you’ve seen in the game today is really a result of that great partnership,” Clifford said. Members of the team were encouraged to monitor Reddit and reach out to the player community for feedback throughout the process.

It’s a tradition that they continued as the game entered open beta in 2018, launched on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in May, and officially left early access in September.

“We had our own vision for what features we wanted to create and where we wanted to take the game, but we tried to be as transparent as possible with the Dauntless community.”Īs soon as they designed new features, the developers would add them to a roadmap at. “We believed we had something great on our hands, but we knew that to turn it into something memorable, we would need the help of our community,” said Phoenix Labs marketing director Nick Clifford. Since Phoenix Labs launched the closed beta for the co-op action RPG Dauntless in August 2017, the developers have been focused on giving players what they want.
