Dauntless's launch on Steam has gone horribly, horribly wrong with overwhelmingly negative reviews: 'This update is easily, out of every game I've ever played, the worst one I've seen'

Dauntless has launched on Steam, and smashed straight into a gigantic brick wall that says "Overwhelmingly negative." The co-op hunting game, which has been available to play since August 2017 but is new to Steam, has over a few days accumulated nearly 1,000 negative reviews and they're all about the major overhaul Dauntless received for this launch. The short version: Everyone, and I mean everyone, hates what it's done.

The complaints revolve around the double-whammy of the Steam relaunch seeing progress reset for players, which is not the first time Dauntless has pulled that trick, alongside a new monetisation model that does sound a little bit much.

"All weapons you had in the game are taken from you," says Dragontooth562. "Weapons are locked behind a $20 pay wall. (Apart from the starting 7). Removed a lot of weapons (Yes the ones you love and grinded for) [...] This game was a prime example of a game that never needed to be touched and was ruined, update by update."

The Steam relaunch and the changes to the game also came shortly after players discovered that developer Phoenix Labs, founded by Riot alumni, had been acquired in 2023 in an unannounced deal, and its parent company is now Forte. Forte is a blockchain company and, erm, according to a Game Developer report Phoenix Labs staff were ordered to keep silent about the acquisition, which is always a positive sign.

"This update is easily, out of every game I've ever played, the worst one I've ever seen," notes Steam user Saturniidae. "But it was the first update that came out after a new company bought Phoenix, who was a blockchain/NFT group. Well they have still had their hands in games that had nothing to do with crypto stuff, like.... oh all those games closed down very soon after. Hmm."

OK, so things weren't going well. The developer then issued a letter to the community seeking to justify the changes made to the game, and it's only thrown fuel on the fire. Phoenix Labs says the great reset is so all players have to do the tutorials for the new systems, and I'm not kidding: "We wanted to ensure that even veteran players would have and take the time to dig into the new and complex systems before jumping straight into the hunt potentially with non-ideal gear set-ups, therefore encountering a degree of difficulty that would be counter to a positive gameplay experience."

This went down as well as you'd think. Phoenix clearly knows people are fuming about this, but the best it can offer is the slightly weaksauce idea that veterans will race through this content anyway. Great I guess? Finally the developer does acknowledge an issue with players accessing chain blades, strikers or repeater weapons without an in-game purchase, and says it's made a change to grant pre-Awakening players versions of these.

The fairly long missive basically just explains all the changes and why Phoenix Labs thinks they're great anyway. An especially bum note is when it addresses the complaints about new Canisters being loot boxes, and says "Canisters are indeed loot boxes, however, our team has taken a very careful approach."

Needless to say, the letter has not had the desired effect. "The contents of this massive text dump amount to 'this is how the game works, this is what you hate about the new Dauntless,'" huffs Umbra. "That's it. Not 'we're going to change this,' or 'we're going to fix this,' just 'this is how a loot box works; you don't HAVE to buy it.' Yeah, we KNOW how a loot box works. We don't want them here. The new gameplay is, in my opinion, pretty good. The new monetization model is dog shit."

Dauntless is due to receive a big update on December 19, and Phoenix Labs hopes to address some of the issues players have: But there are clearly some bigger problems here that seem beyond a bit of patching. I should point out that the game has always been pitched as a free-to-play alternative to Monster Hunter, so it's not like the grumbles about monetisation are new. PCG's Wes Fenlon, as fine a hunter as you'll find, took Dauntless for a spin a few years back and, while he found plenty to like about the game, the nickel-and-diming got a little too much:

"Once when I booted up Dauntless, and once when I simply returned from a hunt, it threw up ads for its 'ELITE TRACK BUNDLE.' On the screen at the end of every hunt, it shows me how I'm not getting a bonus because I don't have the Fortnite-inspired Elite Hunt Pass [...] Monster Hunter has cats that cook me gigantic steaks; Dauntless has this guy who wants me to spend $9.99 on Platinum. Yes, it's an unfair comparison, but only one of them fills me with joy."

Dauntless nevertheless won over a sizeable playerbase and has been a going concern for seven years now: So there is clearly a good game somewhere in there. But a launch that should've brought it to a much wider playerbase, and maybe even seen it win some veterans back, has attracted all the wrong sort of attention. Per SteamDB the game currently has just over 400 players. Phoenix Labs may well feel the changes it's made to the game are justified, but it's got a long way to go to convince its players.