Game Review - Dauntless

Game Review: Dauntless by Phoenix Labs
Score: +6/-4

Since launch, Dauntless has undergone several progression overhauls and quality of life changes, and in its currents state is very single-player friendly. Which is really essential because the core concept of Dauntless fails because it relies too much on pick-up-groups.

Dauntless is a massively multiplayer RPG where you and other Slayers team up to hunt powerful creatures known as Behemoths. Explore the furthest reaches of the Shattered Isles as you quest, craft, and fight to forge your legacy as a legendary Slayer.

Before we review the pros and cons, we should first start with our perspectives on Dauntless, which will put in proper context how we evaluated the game.

From the very start, and even in the current incarnation, Dauntless at its core is "small parties fighting bosses". You are meant to queue either a party or the group finder and tackle one boss encounter at a time as a group. This has a lot of consequences:

• Enemy design expects group play. If you go solo, you cannot expect to properly execute weapon combos or strategies against the bosses because the boss will constantly be focussed on you.
• This is not as bad as it seems, except encounters which involve two bosses at a time. Then if you are solo, all strategy just goes out the window simply because you can't properly do it when there's another boss constantly on you.
• Weapon viability expects group play. You cannot expect that every weapon will be equally viable against every enemy, although some are meant to be less specialized.
• A bad party will ruin gameplay.
• There really is a demographic that really just wants to get in there and mash the attack button and win. They don't even care about the most necessary mechanics.
• They have a "damage dealer" arrogance that sheer damage output will overcome everything in short order. And to some extent they are right, until they don't actually have enough damage output to pull it off. But they don't care that they failed and caused others to fail too.

Players not playing as intended -- i.e., not wanting to learn mechanics and just hoping to steamroll every encounter -- ultimately makes Dauntless better as a single player boss fight game. If you have a stable group of friends to play with consistently, good for you. Otherwise, join the increasing number of MMO players who want to play an MMO as a single player game just to avoid the frustration of being grouped with idiots -- and we see that Phoenix Labs responded early with the "Private Hunt" option, where enemies are scaled according to the number of party members, even if it's just one player.

But scaling down a group boss never works properly simply because core aspects of the game wasn't designed that way.

But honestly, playing Dauntless as a single player game is still the best and most fulfilling way to go. Every victory is yours alone and you can be assured you were never carried by anyone else.

And single-player online games can certainly be successful, such as Genshin Impact and Path of Exile. These are designed as single player games with optional co-op, and Dauntless should have been overhauled early to be that. It's playable as single-player right now, but the underlying designs undermine it.

So with this context, here are our observations.

-1 It's straight grinding all the way.

• There is basically no meaning at all to anything you do. From the very start you are basically thrown into grinding boss fights. There are some different modes, a bit of gathering for crafting, but every encounter is basically a boss fight. So you either like the combat or there's no point.
• -1 They do try to have some main story quest but it's so token and boring. "Go kill boss type X a couple of time sand report back". There's basically no sense of purpose to what you are doing.
• There are side quests that are equally token and sometimes make even less sense. For example, there's a quest to protect Arbourhome refugees fleeing to Ramsgate from Terra Behemoths. So you need to kill those Terra Behemoths to cover their escape. Except you can kill them absolutely anywhere you find them, even if they aren't anywhere close to Arborhome. But magically, that completes the quest and the refugees make it to Ramsgate.
• There are various other quests, bounties, achievements, and challenges to try to direct you to kill specific things in certain ways. All this distracts you from the fact that you are basically killing the same pool of monsters over and over.
• Fortunately there is a certain monster difficulty tier so that as you inch your way through this repetitive grind to get monster parts for upgrading your gear, you slowly encounter new types of behemoths that you have to slay even more of to craft a single item.
• It sounds like a terrible grind, but again -- this is bad only IF you don't like the combat and fights. Some people do.

-1 Group finder is terrible

• Example of what could happen: You queue for a Hunt and end up in an instance with two players miles away and who have apparently just killed a Behemoth. Eh?
• Though this is probably a consequence of having changed Hunts to landmasses with constantly replenishing boss encounters. Early in Dauntless release, a Hunt was a single boss and you all queued in at the same time because you all had to take it down before it's enrage meter was too high. And when the boss was slain, the instance was over.

+1 Fairly good weapon customization.

• Most of the time what you will be doing is mashing your attack buttons and trying to get full combos off. But they introduce more and more gearing and customization options as you progress.
• Particularly with Cells that give you additional perks when you do what you normally do, there is actually a decent array of options, theoretically according to what your fighting style or combat goals are (e.g., breaking boss parts to get crafting materials).

+1 "Endless" power creep and fairly good customization.

• A lot of players will probably count this as a negative, but I feel the deliberate way they pace your ability to acquire upgrades gives players more long-term playability (there's something to work toward) and satisfaction (feeling the effects of that power creep as you progress).

+1 Strategy counts -- when you can apply it.

• If you learn a behemoth's moves in Dauntless, you can start to apply what you learn and make fights easier.
• And the best way to do this is Private Hunt mode where you don't have the behemoth all over the place chasing other players around so that you can watch how it reacts to you, and in what sequence.

-1 Strategy quickly becomes worthless

• Many bosses simply strike too quickly and too frequently, or have attacks that are too hard to dodge, so many fights end up being damage races before you are downed.
• Dodging does not cancel your current action, so you are frequently stuck doing something else -- such as even a basic attacks -- and you cannot react fast enough because you are waiting for an animation to end.
• There are many situations where you encounter two behemoths -- usually in Escalations and island Events -- and that also throws a lot of strategy out the window.
• So even though the design seems to favour learning boss fights, in fact it is all too easy to just give up on that and button mash. Especially when you are in a team and everyone is doing the same.

+1 Focus on fashion

• One of the "real end game" elements for a successful MMO.
• Lots of fashion to craft and earn from completing season challenges, without spending real money.

+1 Careful use of Pay-to-Zoom

• You can buy extra reward payouts (e.g., from the season Battle Pass) but overall they are careful with how much you can pay to accelerate progress.
• Even if you play the game strictly as free-to-play, there's a lot of gameplay to be had, assuming you actually like the fundamentals of how they design combat and fights. But don't expect to progress to the harder content quickly.

+1 No PvP

• Probably contentious to put this as a plus, but honestly it is for every MMO.
• PvP encourages cheating and toxic chat in basically every single game that has it. Dauntless chat is happily peaceful with no need to moderate. Another great example of an MMO that can do well without PvP at all.