How the Team Making Dauntless Aim to Take on Monster Hunter

Hunting giant monsters with other people in order to get better gear and hunt even bigger monsters was a console-exclusive activity for years. But now that Monster Hunter: World is coming to the PC, things are about to change. This leaves Dauntless, the free to play game from Phoenix Labs that was positioning itself as a Monster Hunter-like game for PC, in a peculiar position.

Apart from the price, is there any reason to play an imitation if you can play the real deal? Well, according to this PCGamesN article, there are several, from Dauntless’ focus on online functionality to the potential innovations it may bring to the sub-genre by being its own thing that gets the benefit of real-time feedback and iteration.

A few snippets:

“Much like how we’ve drawn on Monster Hunter for inspiration, we’ve drawn on other games like Destiny and World of Warcraft to help us create on online space for players to live,” Nick Clifford, marketing manager for Phoenix Labs, says. “Dauntless is going to be a game that, knock on wood, we’re going to operate for years to come.”

Clifford hopes the online functionality his team are building for Dauntless will be what differentiates it from Monster Hunter. “Everything we do, we build it through the lens of a co-op, social game. I think Monster Hunter does support multiplayer, which is great, but often it’s matchmaking or lobbies versus something that’s been built from the ground up to be an online social experience.”

Unfortunately, that online space isn’t there yet. There is definitely more in the way of a social experience in Dauntless than in the Monster Hunter series already, but it is limited to a small hub area that functions more like a glorified menu screen. At a later point, there will also be guilds that will be expanded upon until they resemble the clans system in Destiny 2.

All of that is a way off for now. But Phoenix Labs are taking small steps towards that goal in the meantime. This is seen in the latest update, Sharpen Your Skills, which adds new Behemoths to fight and the new war pike weapon, which is Dauntless’s first foray into long-range combat.

[…]

Mostly, though, the Sharpen Your Skills update is a reminder that, as a player, you will be left asking ‘what’s next?’ for some time. The next weapon, the next Behemoth, the next building block for the world – it is all coming soon, with a public Dauntless roadmap on Trello giving continual updates on what Phoenix Labs are working on. While it is good to know there is a plan, it is hard to ignore how limited the game currently is, with many of the more exciting features being nothing more than a tease.

Dauntless is still in closed beta, of course, but even when version 1.0 comes out, the team want to be working on it for “years”. The storyline is still to come, many assets in the game are placeholders, and the original weapon designs are due to be changed at some point.

There are some really positive changes to the game since it first went into closed beta, however. Where the game’s progression was initially limited and felt akin to a linear grindfest, it has become more interesting with the implementation of cells – modifiers that change how combat works. They can be generic or specifically change how your weapon works and, like all other systems in Dauntless, the current iteration is just the beginning.

“I don’t even know if you’d call it version one of the cell system, it’s just of our first foray into [it],” Tornay tells me. “A big thing that we wanted to do was we knew we wanted to get feedback on early iterations, to see how people were using them before we invested a tonne of effort or indicated a direction. Once you signal your intention, it’s hard to take that back – we knew we had an opportunity to say ‘hey, here’s a couple of ways to use the cell system’. We’ll see how people use it and we’ll continue to iterate. I think you’ll see something in the cell system later on, like cell upgrades and things like that, that will keep the system fresh but also accessible.”