Dauntless Getting Challenging 'Trials', Fantastic Rewards in New, Free Update

By Casey DeFreitas

The newest free update for Dauntless will add Trials, the most challenging content yet, and with it, brand new, prestigious rewards. A new Trial featuring an ultra-tough Behemoth with hybrid abilities will rotate in every week starting July 16 as part of the free “Fortune & Glory” content update.

“Fortune & Glory” is the beginning of the “High Skies” season in Dauntless, with a pirate-themed Hunt Pass to go with the new NPC, Lady Luck.  The High Skies season will continue with a new Hunt Pass later this summer, though no word on what theme to expect when it comes. But, we do know plenty about the new Trials, and the future of Dauntless as a whole.

Unfamiliar with Dauntless? Watch our review above. 

Dauntless Trials Explained

These Trials will consist of Behemoths that already exist, but with a hodgepodge of unexpected abilities taken from any other Behemoths in Dauntless to create new, difficult fights each week with a recommended 550 gear level. Imagine something like, but not exactly:  An Embermane – but now it’s equipped with Stormclaw’s electric fencing and Shrowd’s black hole ball on top of all of its other innate abilities.

Travis Day, a senior game designer at Dauntless, explained that this particular combo didn’t quite make it in as-is, but it was one of the first ideas they tested.

Trials key art

“We were four player co-oping [the test Trials Embermane], it started making fences and then as he’s making a fence, the Shrowd orb appeared on the other side of the fence and we’re like trying to boop him and I’m just… Holy crap. We wiped horribly. And I said, this is glorious. Let us continue in this vein of development,” Day explained, laughing maniacally. (Not really, but he was amused at his own team’s failure, for sure.)

With Trials comes another mechanic described on Dauntless’ roadmap called aggressive fauna. Day described these as slugs that will pollute the map with trails of lava, for example. They can be killed so they don’t get out of hand, but it’ll be up to you to decide if it’s worth diverting your attention from the main target to take care of them.

Dauntless Trial Difficulties 

Further upping the challenge will be two difficulty settings for Trials: Normal, and, pulling from the game’s namesake, Dauntless. Normal still recommends a gear score of 550, so expect Dauntless difficulty level to be unforgiving.

Based on how quickly the monstrous Behemoth is taken down, a star rank between one and three is awarded. The completion time can be artificially reduced by breaking Behemoth parts, and the higher the rank, the better the rewards.

Some of the pirate-themed gear to expect with the Fortune & Glory Hunt Pass

“The Dauntless difficulty is meant to be sort of the new pinnacle of most challenging content in the game,” Day said. “Bring your ‘A’ game, get your consumables, change your loadouts to accommodate for the fight because it’s going to be serious business.”

Day also suggested to coordinate with your crew to decide who’s dropping Pylons and who’s wearing Medic, and that these Trials are in-part made to encourage players to use Cells that otherwise don’t get a lot of love — like the aforementioned Medic, or Fireproof, Shockproof, or whatever the case is with the upcoming threat.

“We did a lot of internal playtesting with teams and we’ve even got a new Cell type that’s very much aligned towards a support-y but difficult, interesting play-style,” Day said.

The Cell’s effect in question would reduce the effect of basic healing flasks, but would increase Pylon radius.

“We’re trying to really lean in on people having different builds that sort of help the team,” Day explained.

Dauntless Trial Rewards – Steel Marks and Gilded Marks 

Lady Luck

Defeating a Trial on Normal difficulty rewards Steel Marks, and defeating it on Dauntless difficulty rewards Gilded Marks, each of which are exclusively used for different items in Lady Luck’s new shop. Steel Marks can be turned in for usable items like new weapon mods, weapon specials, cells and cores. Gilded Marks are for fancy cosmetics, including a brand new type of cosmetic lovingly referred to as “Head Bling” by the Dauntless team.

The official name is actually Head Accessory, and one of the first items available for that slot will be a “glowy” crown that orbits a player’s head.

Lady Luck’s shop won’t have limited-time only rewards, so you could eventually buy the most expensive items even if you’re only achieving a 1-Star rank each week in the Trials, which rewards the least amount of Marks. New items will be added as time goes on.

Lady Luck and Slayers

“It’s very much meant to be this long series of goals for players to work on over time. Come back every week, do your Trials, get your currency, choose if you want to spend it on stuff you can afford or save it up for the more expensive stuff,” Day said.

Plus, if you’re not into the most hardcore version of Trials — the Dauntless difficulty — you won’t be missing out on any items that actually affect gameplay.

Dauntless Trials Top 100 Rank Rewards 

Lastly, as far as rewards and challenges go, the top 100 players and teams each week, determined by their speed against the Trial, will be rewarded “prestige” cosmetics. These will be existing cosmetic items that can be earned with Trial currency, but with a different skin. For example, the floating crown Head Accessory will appear golden instead of blue.

“The goal was to sort of give people who want to, you know, show off how awesome they are. Like, ‘Look at me, I placed in the top hundred, therefore I get access to like the backstage of cooler cosmetics,’” Day explained.

To check who’s on top at any given time each week, the new Wall of Champions can be checked outside Lady Luck’s shop in Ramsgate to see a list of the top performers in both solo and group hunts.

How Many Trials? 

Dauntless’ Phoenix Labs already has six weeks of Trials planned, and intends to never repeat a challenge — one of Day’s personal goals.

“The subsequent fights will inevitably be sort of like an evolution of whatever learnings we have in that timeframe, to just continue sort of iterating and making these fights as interesting and challenging as we can while factoring in the things that players might be enjoying or not enjoying,” Day said. “The goal is to make sure that you have a new and exciting experience that you’re fighting something that you haven’t fought in this way before.”

Dauntless’ Best New Feature: Quick Retry 

Update: “Retry” is a feature that will be not be available immediately with the July 16 content update, but will be added with a patch soon after. 

Because Trials are made to be so difficult, Phoenix Labs thought ahead to include a small quality of life feature – a retry mechanic.

“The idea of creating challenging content for players is very much hand-in-hand with making it easy to fail and start over. So when we were developing this feature, we were like, we have to get ‘retry’ in,” Day pointed out. “If you’re going to pull up on a new fight and die in 20 seconds, we need to make it as painless as possible to go, ‘Okay fine, restart.’”

Fail or succeed, teammates (or solo slayers) will be able to vote to stay together to try again, no return to Ramsgate or unnecessary loading screens needed.

“You don’t want to go through three minutes of loading screens just to die in 20 seconds, that’s really miserable experience,” Day lamented. “This was just sort of me going like, look guys, I like Dark Souls. Make it hard, but also make it real fast to continue iterating.”

The Future of Dauntless: Nintendo Switch, New Weapons, and More

Day said Phoenix Labs is already working on the next feature that will launch after Trials and is focusing on making Dauntless the best game it can be regardless of what other games in the market are doing.

When I asked if there was anything special planned to compete with Monster Hunter World’s Iceborne expansion launching this September, Day reiterated this sentiment, and PR Manager Andy Burt jokingly asked if they needed to worry about productivity over the launch.

“Probably,” Day said, “I’ll probably take like, a week off work… That’s what I did when Monster Hunter (World) came out. Just no-life it for a week straight.”

Where the inspiration is apparent, Dauntless does having something in the works for the future that it’s niche genre-sister doesn’t: a Nintendo Switch launch

Currently, Dauntless is set to be playable on the Switch sometime this winter, but IGN was able to play at E3 in June, up against the recently reintroduced Winterhorn Skraev.

Dauntless’ performance on Switch was, to be honest, rough looking — like many other Switch ports — but more playable than the Scorchstone Hellion was when Dauntless first launched on PS4 (which has since been patched and greatly improved). When asked if the team was happy with the Switch performance, a Phoenix Labs spokesperson responded with:

“What you saw at E3 was our first playable demo running on Nintendo Switch. We’re very proud of the progress the team has made in the months we’ve spent on it. A reoccurring theme in Dauntless’ development is iteration and improvement. As you saw in the Beta, we iterated on not only things like Behemoths, weapons, and balance, but we also spent a significant time optimizing the game for PCs and console. The work we’re doing on the Nintendo Switch build of Dauntless will end up benefiting the game overall, as we’ll be able to carry those optimizations over to other platforms.

The Switch version is only going to get better throughout the year leading into launch, and not just on the performance front. We are developing specifically for the Switch form factor, so things like HD Rumble will also come online soon.”

Producer Chris Fox said every improvement made to Dauntless leading up to the Nintendo Switch launch will also directly affect the Switch version.

“…We are using the exact same game. You have your cross play, your cross-account stuff. There really is no difference between the versions so when we find a couple FPS improvements here, it applies to every single version, even PC,” Fox explained.

However, as it is now, Dauntless requires an internet connection at all times to play, devaluing the Switch’s portability perk a bit.

Though nothing is set in stone at the moment, if the opportunity presents itself, Fox said Dauntless will appear on Stadia, too, and it’s already planned for mobile.

Every member of the team I spoke to echoed the sentiment that Dauntless’ content updates and expansions aren’t slowing down anytime soon, either. Expect a big content expansion every six to eight weeks with patches every two weeks.

“That might not be a Behemoth every six to eight weeks, but it will be something of that level. It could be a new weapon or a new game mode or an update to a key feature,” Fox said.

The last new weapons added were the Repeaters, which were created after the community requested a ranged weapon option.

The Repeaters

“When we started, we were like, ‘No, no no, we’re a melee game, we’re never going to do ranged,'” Fox said, “…[The community] wanted ranged, so we made [the Repeaters] and it turned out to be one of the more unique and fun weapons in the game.”

When asked about new weapons to come, Fox said it shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re making more,  but they’re still trying to figure out exactly what that will be.

For more on Dauntless, make sure to see the Dauntless Review, How Monster Hunter World Helped Dauntless Grow, and How Dauntless Became the First Game to Launch with PS4 Cross-Play.

Casey DeFreitas is an Editor at IGN who loves monster hunting, slaying, and catching. Catch her on Twitter @ShinyCaseyD.