The combat also relies heavily on dodge rolls to take advantage of those crucial invincibility frames, moments during an animation when you can’t get hurt, to avoid death while maintaining position. Our squadmates, Clifford and Phoenix Labs Community Manager Ian Tornay, both made several allusions to the influence of Dark Souls and Bloodborne on the combat, and it shows in the measured rhythm of mixing light and heavy attacks, while reading your opponents’ animations to anticipate their strikes. As promised, Skarn was a huge, quadruped dinosaur encased in thick, stone scales of armor that made it hard to do any real damage.įortunately, two of our party wielded heavy mauls, which temporarily knocked the armor off and left an opening for us to run in and hack with our sword. After several minutes of running around, one of our party found our quarry, “a larger, lumbering pile of rocks” called a Skarn. On landing, our three-person party set out to find our first behemoth. The hunt itself took place on one of the floating islands, traveled to in a loading screen via airship. Players will also be able to connect with friends or through standard matchmaking, so you’re never limited in with whom you can play. Ramsgate feels more like an old-school MMO public space than something you’d find in, say, Destiny 2: It’s populated with up to 60 real players (starting with your friends, followed by your guild, and then filling in the rest with people geographically close to you). Our journey began in the city of Ramsgate, which serves as an MMO-style social hub where you can meet up with friends, craft gear, change your appearance, or take on new hunts.
We liked Monster Hunter - we felt like there was a good game in there, but it’s surrounded by a lot of cruft, a lot of unknowable design. The game features a narrative campaign that unlocks progressively more difficult areas and behemoth hunts, but gameplay is more focused on short sessions than overall progress. You are a Slayer, whose order has hunted behemoths for generations and is needed now more than ever. Giant monsters known as “Behemoths” have always been part of the world, but recent expansions of the frontier have provoked a deadly backlash, bringing horrendous monsters down onto vulnerable settlements.
Kill the beast!ĭauntless takes place on the Shattered Isles - a fantasy realm spread across a drifting archipelago of floating islands. In closed beta since September, 2017, Dauntless is shaping up to be a viable alternative for players who see how much fun Monster Hunter fans are having, but, for whatever reason, aren’t willing to take the plunge themselves. “It’s about getting together with your friends, slaying these badass, larger-than-life monsters, crafting tons of gear along the way, and having a lot of fun and looking really cool while you do it,” said Phoneix Labs Marketing Manager Nick Clifford. The founding core of former League of Legends developer Riot Games staffers at Phoenix Labs means they have ample experience at crafting the sort of systemically-rich, but widely-accessible gameplay that Dauntless needs in order to pull this off. Dauntless takes the basic gameplay loop and strips out a lot of the complexity with shorter gameplay sessions and radically simplified crafting that won’t have you poring over wiki articles. Monster Hunter, which is extremely popular in Japan and has a smaller, devoted following in the U.S., is known for, among other things, time consuming missions and obtuse crafting mechanics. We’re talking about Dauntless, a free-to-play action RPG from indie studio Phoenix Labs, which takes the Monster Hunter formula - hunt, craft, repeat - and adapts it for a wider audience.
No, we aren’t talking about Monster Hunter World, Capcom’s upcoming home console adaptation coming in January, 2018. At long last, western players will be able to hunt giant monsters with friends, and use their corpses to craft weapons and armor to hunt even bigger monsters on the platforms they prefer. After years of being relegated to handheld consoles, the Monster Hunter experience is finally coming to big-screen platforms.
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