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As a longtime MH player, I've been following along with Dauntless for some time now. I signed up for the beta a ways back but completely forgot I had, and was looking through the founders packs a few days back, woke up the next day to an email with beta codes! So first off, I can't thank the devs enough for giving me a chance to play, and help get a few friends into these sorts of games.
I thought it might be helpful to post my impressions of the game thus far. I haven't gotten too far into it yet, so I'm not going to speak on the quality of crafting gear or fights later on, but I will stick to what I've seen and how it has changed my views on where I plan to progress. I don't know how active the devs are in taking cues from the player base, but maybe getting my thoughts out there can help in some way. I'm going to be breaking this down into a few different points. As much as I wish I could draw comparisons to another set of games, Dauntless is clearly inspired by Monster Hunter so my comparisons will be drawn from there. Not as a means of saying which is better, but as talking points. And all of this is with the full knowledge that the game is still in beta and may very well change quite a bit by full release.
In addition, I used one of the beta keys I received for my roommate, as he's been interested in the MH series but hasn't been able to handle them as portables very well. So I'm also talking to him in order to get a better feel for how all of this comes through to someone who's familiar with the concepts but has no actual experience playing these types of games.
Story
The least part of any hunting game like this is probably the story, but I still feel that's no reason to skimp out. Sure, the stories are there to give a flimsy reason for why people go out there killing giant monsters, but the world the stories take place in is pretty important in my opinion. The Monster Hunter world really makes you feel like you're part of a community in any game you're playing. Sure, you're the strongest, fastest, most capable hunter around. But you're still very much someone who has to go out there and hunt for your own food, or medicine, or supplies for the town. Being a hunter in MH feels very much like being in a world where humanity is part of a much greater whole, battling it out for their fair share of that world but still respecting the larger ecosystems they're in.
From what I've gathered thus far, the story in Dauntless is a bit more grim. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding right now is that humanity is forced to live up on the floating islands, and the behemoths are more or less trying to ruin that by sapping all the aether from the islands and cause them to fall. Instead of being a world based on the balance of food chains, this seems more like the last vestiges of humanity battling some otherworldly or ancient threat. That's not to say this is a bad thing, again the stories in these games are there to give a reason to fight and this is as good of one as any, but I can't help feeling that there's something missing here. The world doesn't feel quite as immersive.
Visuals
The game looks pretty great. I'm running it on a PC with some processor issues so I'm having to run it on low settings, but even then it still looks good. The designs of weapons, armor, and the monsters they come from are all very distinct at a glance. By far the best thing about the visuals in this game are the monsters. The designs are all pretty novel, which came as a surprise to me. After years of RPGs, and then getting into MH, I was expecting something to show up that's at least a little derivative, and there hasn't been anything that stuck out to me as a blatant rip off.
Gameplay
The meat of Dauntless. I'm gonna break this section up into a few different parts since otherwise it would just be one long, uninterrupted train of ramblings.
Gear
The gear is incredibly straightforwards. Wear this item, get this boost. It makes it very easy to mix and match different sets to personalize the buffs you want to take into a fight. One you know better, you can take pieces that reduce your health but do increased damage, or buff your health high for an unfamiliar or tough adversary. Without having to deal with skill gems in order to get a decent set, it makes gearing up quite a bit more straightforwards and I can appreciate that.
However, I do feel there's a certain lack of depth. I'm assuming that this is due to there not being as many kinds of armor as there are in MH, but quite a lot of the upgrades just seem like outright better versions of their previous iterations; in MH you could still often find a use for an older piece of lower ranked gear if it still gave you good benefits that slotted into your build well. I'm hoping this is something that is just a result of there being less content in the game now than there will be later.
Crafting
The simplified crafting is a joy. From the moment I saw Dauntless my first concern was that the crafting system would be as confusing a mess to new players as MH's can be at first. Luckily this hasn't been a problem so far. My roommate hasn't had to ask me any questions about crafting, and I find the interface to be pretty cool, although the general UI could do with a bit of sprucing up. I've found that when using a controller, most of the NPC menus just plain won't work forcing me to put down my controller and pick up a mouse. Cracking orbs absolutely won't work. I've also found an odd thing where even when using a mouse, selecting the craft button or revealing something from an orb won't work with just a click. The cursor has to be moving in order for it to register. I'm chalking this up to a combination of it being in beta, and that I'm using DS4Windows with a PS4 controller, as I notice flickering between keyboard and controller inputs on some options, like the game is having a hard time deciding which input I'm using.
I also feel there's an opportunity being missed out on with the way upgrading your armor doesn't do anything, that I've seen, other than change its defense values. With there being static buffs applied to each piece of gear, I think it would be fantastic if upgrading a piece that has, say, +25 health would give you an additional 5 health from each upgrade. Or perhaps that as you reach upgrade thresholds, smaller buffs are applied. So that same piece of armor that was giving you +25 health is now also giving you a healing boost of 10% if you heal within a certain timeframe after taking damage. Players who enjoy having that extra net from more health are already going to be playing a bit more slowly or more carefully, or maybe they're just rough mechanically, so incentives for them to back up, heal, and take stock of a fight would be cool. The same could be applied to the other armors, making utility armors a bit more useful, or making damage armors give you more damage output in smaller ways. This way you could take multiple upgraded pieces of armor and put them all together to make very different builds from what others are using. Perhaps making this a branching path. You could get more health on your health boosting armor by strengthening it with more parts from the same monster, or add lesser effects from other armor pieces by instead using those monsters' drops to upgrade the original piece. A player could be stopped from making an "ultimate" armor by having lower tiered gear have a cap for how many extra attributes it could have.
This would add a lot of depth for the crafting without making it something that's too complex. Perhaps make adding extra effects cost more of the secondary or tertiary parts from other monsters, or require very specific parts.
Combat
The combat in this game overall feels a lot more responsive and quick. A bit less like a chess match, and more like a brawl. I've tried out all the weapons and found them all to be enjoyable in their own ways, but as someone who enjoys agility I much prefer the Sword, War Pike, and Chain Blades. It's pretty clear that the devs are working on more weapon types, so all I'll say on that topic is that the ones they have now could probably use a bit of focus on what they're supposed to be exactly, but otherwise they're all fantastic weapons to use.
As for the battles themselves, the behemoth attacks are very well telegraphed, and quite a few of them threw me for loops when I first saw them. Affecting the battlefield, using attacks that have incredible ranges, and their up close aggression makes you always have to be on your toes, watching how the monster is acting. It's fantastic, and I can only assume as the devs make more monsters and some up with more fantastic designs that there will be some crazy beasties down the pipe at a later date.
The combat isn't flawless, though. There's a certain weight that seems to be missing. In MH you can sort of feel each swing. There's a gritty realism to the flow of a battle even in a world that has people falling indefinitely with no damage, or casually swinging around weapons larger than they are. It's sort of like a tug of war between two forces, and as the smaller human player you're forced to stack the deck in your favor however you can. Each hit carries a very definite immediate payoff, slashing like a frenzied madman or hitting singular, larger strikes have very different feelings.
[Edit:] On a similar note, I'm not a fan of the way elemental damage is implemented here. Having it restricted to only certain weapon attacks, not all of which are always viable whether from timing or due to them being moves with lower native DPS output to others, is kind of odd. Why incentivize people to use bonus damage types if they won't actually be benefitting from that extra damage outside of specific instances? If I craft a weapon that's specifically strong against a particular behemoth, I should be rewarded for that foresight, not forced to use a combo I otherwise might not have in order to use that element, potentially opening me up for retaliation as I try to fit in slower combos, or forcing me to use more stamina for the faster, unlimited ones that use elemental damage.
I really don't get that feeling when fighting something here. The monsters don't have that same feeling of realism in this world. They don't clearly fit into any ecosystem like the ones in MH do, with adaptations that suit their environment. Instead they seem more like themes, and while that's definitely not a bad thing it IS something I noticed, and if it stuck out I figured there's a reason it picked at me.
The feedback from the monsters as a fight wears on kind of suffers from the same thing. Breaking parts doesn't really seem to affect a monster in any way here, in fact two that I've fought could just recharge their armor seemingly whenever they wanted to. Perhaps its just my relative inexperience with this game, but when I destroy a Quillshot's spikes I don't really see any difference in the amount of damage it does or takes, and when I cut off a Gnasher's tail I feel that it should have less attack range, or when using its tail attack it should become much more unstable. Little things like showing how the battle is affecting the monster go a long way in grueling fights. From what I've seen, monsters here keep up a general pattern of aggression no matter what, and the only real difference in knowing how close you are to a monster dying is when it runs away, or when it takes longer to breathe after an attack before the next one. You can see how destroying or weakening a monster in MH affects its ability to fight; some will lose the energy to use breath attacks, or their attacks will not only take longer to execute but will be much slower in that execution, or they'll start making riskier moves and leave themselves far more open to attack afterwards. You can see them getting desperate to survive.
If fighting these things is the core of the gameplay, then each fight should feel like something that you can see wearing down over time. Right now it feels more like slashing at a bag of meat until it stops moving, not so much hunting a beast more powerful than you are and wearing it down over time. Again, I'm hoping that this is something of a growing pain as the game comes closer and closer to its full release.
Conclusion
Dauntless, so far as I've seen, is a fantastic game. It accomplishes what it sets out to do very well, and I fully look forwards to diving deeper and deeper to see what lays in waiting, whether it's already in the game now or is something that will be releasing between now and when the game launches, and hopefully for a long time after it does. But unfortunately, Dauntless will be compared to MH titles, and so it's got large shoes to fill. It's the little differences that will likely make the largest impacts on people's choice of whether or not Dauntless is worth playing up against its older cousin, and those are the areas that I feel will need the most polish moving forwards. Dauntless will have to both do everything MH does well to a similar degree while having to stand out, not just be a free to play knock off. More so now than before, with MHW slated for a PC release eventually. Otherwise, I'm concerned that people will just opt for MHW over Dauntless in the future, and a game that clearly has this much love and care put into it deserves much better than that.
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