Dauntless Interview

Phoenix Labs’ co-operative action-RPG Dauntless is currently going through open beta, and if everything goes according to plan, the game should see a full release on the Epic Games store, consoles, and mobile devices later this year. With that in mind, the folks over at WCCFTech had a fairly extensive chat with a number of Phoenix Labs developers.

The resulting interview covers such topics like the importance of player feedback for the ongoing development of Dauntless, the team’s future plans for the game, the upcoming console and mobile releases, some Epic Games store-related PR talk, and more. A few sample questions:

Besides the console release which I want to go deeper into later, what kind of content and/or new features do you have planned for Dauntless throughout this year, starting with the next couple of updates?

Jesse: We’re not only going to continue to push new Behemoths events as well as event based content where the game world will change. We’re also looking at new forms of content, new ways of experiencing Dauntless, exploring islands and that kind of stuff. Chris can give some more details there. But at a high level, as we continue to progress and understand what our players like, we’re continuing to build more kind of specific content for them.

A good example of this is our Scorchstone Hellion. The Hellion was one of the fan favorite behemoths. Folks were kind of asking for another kind of harder iteration of him, so a few months ago we got started on that effort and then just delivered it. So, you know, we look to the community for inspiration fairly regularly. And then look at where we feel like there’s gonna be lots of impact and then build towards that.

Yeah, that makes sense of course. Are you considering any more challenging content for a larger group of players, like raids?

Jesse: Yeah, you know, we’ve definitely talked about it. In the immediate short term, we are not looking at raid style content. I’m keen to get more folks working and kind of have the party content have more meaning before we start getting into the raid level stuff. Chris, I don’t know if you want to add to that at all?

Chris: Sure. One of our goals for the first part of this year is providing more strategic and tactical combat choices to players and we’re looking at a couple different features which I’m not gonna explicitly spoil right now, but we’re also going to be updating our roadmap to talk about that. One of the goals there is to build systems and enhance our current systems to provide our design team more opportunities to take existing content, make a more challenging version of that and provide rewards that are commeasured with that challenge. We’re also going to be looking at, as I said, some combat revamps and I know one of the questions in the community was around weapon customization and what would we be looking at next. We’re actually looking at all weapons right now in terms of providing players with more combat options. That is things that I would want to take into the battle but also my moment to moment choices that I’m making during combat. I went a little bit wider with my answer there, but we definitely want to provide more challenging content paired with more cool and interesting ways and things for players to do during combat.