Nearly five years after Dauntless first launched on consoles and the Epic Games Store, the free-to-play co-op ARPG finally launched on Steam on December 5, although things haven't gone particularly smoothly since then. Less than a week after the Steam launch, the Steam reviews of Dauntless are already in "Overwhelmingly Negative" territory, with SteamDB citing just 19.21% positive reviews. The negative reviews seem to stem from the changes the game's developer, Phoenix Labs, made to the game when it was launched on Steam.

As part of the new Awakening update and launch on Steam, changes were made to a few key gameplay mechanics, and those changes have not been well received by the community. Additionally, progression has been reset for all players, new and old, forcing players to replay quests they've already completed and re-level weapons they had already mastered. The Awakening update also introduced Canisters, a sort of loot box monetization system that offers in-game cosmetics and can only be accessed in the season pass or by purchasing Platinum, the game's premium currency. Basically all of the posts on the Dauntless subreddit after the update are complaints about the changes to the game's mechanics or about players feeling slighted over the deletion of past progression. Players are also upset that the removal of a swathe of weapons has negatively affected build diversity and made players feel like they wasted their time thoroughly learning the game's mechanics and tuning builds. The developer seemingly tried to mitigate the removal of these weapons by adding new abilities, but that doesn't seem to have been enough to compensate for the decreased build diversity. Yet more complaints stem from apparent performance degradations on both PS5 and Xbox Series consoles. Worse still, those same performance degradations appear to be quite random, with some players saying that their performance has remained the same throughout the update.Phoenix Labs published a response to the criticism in a post to Steam, and while the developer addressed some of the complaints, it did not implement any sweeping changes to the game or the altered mechanics. Some of the response could even be read as dismissive to the player's concerns and complaints, and the statement, as a whole, has been met with criticism, as well.

For legacy players, based on the feedback we've seen, it appears this transition and "reset" back to the start has felt too abrupt or jarring, especially in conjunction with other changes. We want to acknowledge this frustration, and we hope that the speed with which veteran players will be able to move through these quests will ease some of this concern.

The TL;DR of this is that advanced players should be able to move through these pretty quickly both due to the resources we granted to help get you through them, and due to your game knowledge.

Players posting online criticized this particular portion of the developer's response for disrespecting the time they had already invested in their progression. Many veteran players of Dauntless even went so far as to say that they had tried the update, gotten frustrated by the reset, and instead opted to play something like Warframe or Monster Hunter games, which both feature similar loot-driven gameplay mechanics.

Phoenix Labs also addressed criticisms about the lack of build diversity, admitting that the removal of certain weapons may sting for some players, but that the intention was for players to test out different builds for different scenarios. It also commented that there has been positive feedback about the new weapons and that the change would "open the door to more diverse weapons in future seasons," which almost sounds like the developer may focus on pay-to-play season pass weapons instead of those that players can craft or collect otherwise.

We want to acknowledge that these changes mean that there are less weapons per type, per element, and per gameplay use (Cutting etc.). The design intention behind these changes is the creation of more unique weapons that then allow for much more variety in gameplay styles.

We've already seen positive feedback from players that have spent the most time diving in with the new weapons so far, and this opens the door for us to offer much more differentiated weapons in future seasons.

When Dauntless launched on Steam, it was clear that there was a healthy amount of interest, especially for a nearly five-year-old game, with the concurrent player count topping 3,200. However, that rather quickly tapered off in the five days since its launch to a rather disappointing 400-500 concurrent players at the time of writing.