The anticipated co-op action game Dauntless is off to a strong launch. It’s almost too strong a launch, in fact. Servers have been up and down under the volume of players since the game went open beta on Thursday, May 24. Players originally found the game difficult to play… mostly because login queues built up to over ninety thousand players long. Finally however, the servers are up and running on a global scale. And at the end of the line lies a fairly decent game. Here are our thoughts on Dauntless.
What is Dauntless?
Before proceeding, keep in mind the game is in open beta. This means that while it is stable, its current state may not be indicative of the final release.
Dauntless is a free-to-play ARPG (Action RPG) by Phoenix Labs. In it, you take the mantle of a Slayer; a monster hunter tasked with finding and defeating Behemoths. These massive beasts stalk the game’s numerous floating islands, feeding on Aether and breaking the world apart. You and other Slayers travel to the town of Ramsgate; the front line in the fight against the monsters.
Dauntless Graphics: Looks Good if You Can Handle It
Let’s start with how it looks. Well, you find a beautifully animated cell-shaded world, where the planet has been shattered by a powerful energy called the Aether. It is a place where people live on floating islands, and where travel is made possible by sky-ships. It’s a fantasy world we’ve seen before, but it never gets old. And of course, monsters inhabit these islands… and boy, are they pretty.
Every Behemoth has just so much detail to admire. Shrike in particular was one of our favorite designs. It charged us looking like some kind of giant man-owl hybrid. It was genuinely surreal, and almost terrifying in a game outside the horror genre.
The islands themselves are fun to traverse. Wind blows across grasslands. Lush trees pepper the landscape. The visual variety is stunning, especially considering the graphics make use of very minimalistic textures. And the animations are no joke either. The facial expressions on the characters, the lip-syncing in cinematic cutscenes… they are all done with incredible attention to detail. And carefully chosen audio effects and soundtracks make you feel what you see. Every Aether-charged shot you fire is so perfectly rendered, you might as well be holding a cannon and not a keyboard and mouse.
Unfortunately, the graphics do not always perform smoothly, even with close to optimal PC specs. This is surprising considering the Unreal Engine’s power. Frame rates even on an GTX 900 series card can momentarily drop to 30 FPS. Despite having lower quality graphics than Warframe — another instanced co-op game — Dauntless demands more out of your PC.
Dauntless Gameplay 1: Fun… at the End of a Long Line
It seems Phoenix Labs grossly underestimated how badly people wanted to play their game. Two days after release, login queues reached over 90,000 players long. The game is quite good at player retention, so it took over eight hours of waiting just to log in. As of May 27, the developers have announced a zero queue global status, but take that with a grain of salt.
Now that the queue is gone however, let’s enter the game itself. A simple but unique character creation screen greets you before you enter the world. You get to choose two “ancestors” to determine your base look before the classic RPG face sliders show up. A short cutscene plays, and you are thrust in the middle of the game world to begin your first hunt.
The core gameplay itself is great. Your first taste of combat is smooth, and emphasizes proper use of combo attacks and special Aether attacks to take down heavy prey. The game builds on this experience with a crafting system. The focus on crafting emphasizes combat by making each weapon feel very personalized. From dual chain blades, to greatswords, to hammers, every weapon feels unique. Every weapon has a different impact.
Oh and don’t think the Behemoths are defenseless. Once in combat, they will repay your violence in kind. Even heavy animals like the Skarn who you’d think you’d be safe from at range have ways of dealing with you. They will defend their island.
Ah… but the islands… here we see Dauntless’s flaws.
Dauntless Gameplay 2: Large, (Sometimes) Barren, with Pockets of Gold
While Dauntless’s core gameplay is solid its first true weakness comes in level design. And no, we don’t mean the art, as the art is absolutely gorgeous. We mean the fact that each island you visit contains exactly:
- 1 Behemoth (Supposedly there can be multiple Behemoths. I have yet to see more than one.)
- 1 Beautiful 360 degree view
- Herbs
And that’s it. As far as we’ve gone, players only travel to each island with the express purpose of hunting the Behemoth that inhabits it. It takes a few minutes to find the beast and reduce its hit points until it runs away (except for the quick Embermane), and several more minutes to find it and finish it off. There are no minor mobs along the way, no radiant events to distract you… There is little to interact with, if anything at all. If you compare this to Dragon Nest, where the main boss in each dungeon was surrounded by mobs to keep you engaged, or Warframe where each mission node had interactive objects as well as enemies, Dauntless feels… barren.
Granted, Dragon Nest and Warframe are predominantly dungeon crawlers where the player runs through a maze. Each of Dauntless’s islands is a miniature open world… a fully explorable sandbox, if you will. But that is even more reason to fill each island with things to do. What is the point of exploring if there is no reward for doing so? For instance, with the game’s emphasis on crafting, why not allow material gathering as in Breath of the Wild’s mining and fishing systems? Perhaps in the future, we might get more fauna, or interactive content. But for now, this emptiness is Dauntless’s biggest weakness.
Dauntless (can fit) in a Nutshell
So, is Dauntless a good game or not? As far as gameplay and mechanics are cncerned, it is definitely a good game. Visually, it is a stellar game. But at the moment, its levels just feel so empty. Every Behemoth encounter is fun, and rightly so. That is the entire point after all. But what about everything in between? If the game can be summed up into “kill to craft to kill bigger things to craft bigger things,” then players risk early burnout. The good news is that patches have been coming in rapid-fire since day one. The devs obviously listen to feedback and are anxious to keep their project evolving at a steady pace.
Hopefully Phoenix Labs sorts these out. After all, you can bet they already have more content in the works.
Again, the game is in Open Beta. There is a lot to be done before its final release. But at the end of the day, Dauntless is a solid concept, with great execution. Sprinkle a little more content in there, and this will be a game I’ll play for a long, long time.