Dauntless

Dauntless takes place in a fantasy setting, where a cataclysmic event has torn the world apart, releasing monstrous creatures known as Behemoths that prey on the surviving humans and absorbing the aether on the scattered islands. Players take on the role of Slayers to take down Behemoths, collecting loot that they use to craft and upgrade weapons and equipment as to take down larger and more powerful Behemoths. While hunting, the game plays as a third-person action game; the player uses a combo system to attack the creature, while monitoring their own health and stamina gauge. Such hunts can take upwards of twenty minutes of in-game time to complete. The game can be played both as single-player, cooperatively in a party of up to four or in public cooperative instances of up to six people.

Phoenix Labs was formed by former Riot Games developers Jesse Houston, Sean Bender, and Robin Mayne. In January 2017, Phoenix Labs employed 40 developers formerly from BioWare, Blizzard Entertainment, and Capcom. While a small studio compared to the AAA studios they left, Houston said that they are positioned in a way to offer "a new, unique approach to crafting AAA experiences".

Dauntless was heavily inspired by, as well as frequently compared to, Capcom's Monster Hunter series. The developers themselves have a combined playtime of over 6000 hours in various Monster Hunter titles. Dauntless was also influenced by Dark Souls and World of Warcraft. Houston credits Dark Souls specifically for helping to prove out that there is a market for "hardcore action games" focused on player versus environment encounters, which allowed them to take a safe risk on their approach to Dauntless.

Dauntless received tentatively positive reviews at the time of release. Game Informer thought that the core monster hunting gameplay was focused and fun, but warned that advanced players would run out of new content fairly quickly. GameSpot was less enthusiastic, praising the weapon variety and monster design, but criticizing the bugs in the early version of the game and the setting, story, and characters being unfulfilling and not fleshed out.

The release of Awakening in December 2024 was met with large volumes of criticism from players complaining about the change to the progression within the game and incorporation of loot boxes and battle passes which locked out much of the original content from the game. The game subsequently received an overall overwhelmingly negative review on Steam from these players.