Dauntless's recent Steam launch proved disastrous, thanks to some changes the developer made to the core gameplay, which we covered in more detail here. Phoenix Labs responded shortly after the controversy, but that original statement was largely seen as dismissive by the community. Now, Phoenix Labs has put out yet another response, this time responding to individual criticisms and laying out a detailed plan for the future of Dauntless.

In the response, Phoenix Labs starts off by apologizing to the community for the lost progression and disastrous Awakening update. Throughout the rest of the statement, the developer breaks down how it plans to address each of the criticisms, including the progression reset, monetization, and core gameplay changes. The most interesting take-away from Phoenix Labs's response is that the returning players will be rewarded with additional in-game resources—300,000 Rams and 5,000 Combat Merits as well as Peerless Aetherite, scaling based on how many weapons players had crafted before the update—to get them back up to speed in the new system. As of Update 2.2.0, dropping "early next year," players will also no longer have to re-do quests they had already previously completed in order to unlock all game modes and regions. Various challenges and monsters have also received reward drop buffs to speed up progression. Monetization changes include making the free battle pass for future seasons more rewarding, and Phoenix Labs also promised to re-evaluate the monetization strategy in future updates "to balance sustainability with fairness while remaining rewarding for players." As for core gameplay changes, Phoenix Labs has already implemented changes to armor perks, shield caps, and weapon buffs based on feedback, and it says that it will continue to find more ways to add diversity and depth to player builds in future updates.

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.