You Zig, I Zag.

It feels like the gaming and blogging world is playing one thing and I am doing the opposite. Far from being a hipster but it just feels like when the community is going one way I am going the other. There is nothing wrong with that I just can’t relate to the common experiences in Blognation right now. Many people are playing (or back playing) World of Warcraft with the pre-order up and new races to play new alts with. I can’t be bothered right now. I suspect I will at some point but I am too busy leveling characters in EQ2.

With most of the world playing Overwatch I was smitten with Paladins (until they imploded) and I only played Fortnite for the PVE part of “Save the World”, not for the far more popular and populated Battle Royale mode. I suspect much of you are just nodding your head saying “yeah well, we have been trying to tell you you are out of touch” but that is just age, of course. Mine, not yours. Get off my lawn.

Which leads me to my next grand experiment. In a world utterly captivated by Monster Hunter World I am trying the Dauntless camp.

This wasn’t done fully on purpose. I have been humming and hawwing over Monster Hunter World but do not want to compete with my 12  year old for PS4 time. I do prefer my gaming on PC and that version isn’t out for a long time. I checked into Dauntless Reddit, knowing that it was nearing Open Beta and learned a quick, easy tip there. Keys are currently free through a promotion with a streamer (Light it Up Dan!) if you subscribe. The subscription fee is $4.99 (much cheaper than buying one from the Dauntless website) BUT you can also get a free subscription with Amazon Prime – of which I am one – so I ended up getting my key free. It was easy – you link Amazon to Twitch, subscribe to Lightitupdan, type in !keys in the chat, go to his Discord, connect your Twitch to Discord, and a moderator sends you a key in chat. Took me all of 10 minutes (after the hour it took for Discord to refresh the connection to Twitch) and finally I was a Monster Hunter  Slayer!

The tutorial drops you in with a base “training” sword and an immediate quest to collect some items and kill a Rogue beast – the name I already forget. The art style is very Star Wars the Old Republic. Character creation was kind of fun – you pick a Mom and a Dad from some presets and then use a slider to represent which one you look more like post gene-merge. You can still then personalize, but found it fun seeing the hint of features between the two parental units. The graphics are very crisp and clean and the forest felt alive.

Combat was.. slow. I think that is the best word. You hit a button, your character reacts quickly but the act of swinging a big sword takes time. You can’t stop or dodge mid-swing and you really have to understand the Monster Beast’s tells otherwise he is hitting you and interrupting your big, prepared swings. I didn’t love the delay but I do realize it is part of that specific weapon. Killing the Beast wasn’t too hard but I definitely couldn’t see a health bar or any obvious visual clues that he was hurting. We were just fighting, I got low, ran away until I could sort out how to use a potion, came back, worked on my timing for hits and dodging and then he was just dead all of a sudden. Victoire!!

The city was alive and plenty of quest givers and crafters to help you upgrade your weapons and armors. I explored around a bit and even had a couple of lootbox style items to open in a nearby machine. Since this game will be Free to Play there will be a loot box mechanic at some point. I was always in love with the idea of the Pike weapon and sure enough I had one in inventory (one of each weapon, actually) so I equipped it, upgraded a few things, and decided to go on another hunt – still solo, although groups are recommended.

I wasn’t able to pick which Beast to go for – an NPC mentioned to me to go practice against a similar difficulty challenged monster but in the area I found to pick a hunt I only had one option and several beasts were listed there. I picked it anyway to go see what I could solo / sort through and ran into this turtle-like fire creature. It was really interesting when I first approached it – it didn’t attack, but stayed focused on me and as I moved closer it slowly backed off. Timid to attack me but aware I was there and worried of my intentions. When I got too close he did attack.

It was a good fight. I keep forgetting to check my health and there weren’t any obvious warnings and I ended up dying and getting dumped out of the zone for a failed hunt. I am not sure if I was able to keep the items I had found around the forest or not.

It was fun. It does not have nearly the content or world building that exists in Monster Hunter World – at least not the parts I have read about or experienced on my first play through. I did get a bit of killing giant beasts out of my system and will play it a bit more for sure. If you are holding off on MHW until the PC launch and have Amazon Prime then you really have nothing to lose (and no word how many keys LightitupDan has or how long he is giving them away) so go grab one, and check it out, if slaughtering innocent creatures floats your boat. (That’s a whole separate post!)

*final, interesting note. My Nvidia Experience allows you to take screenshots of games (and videos, but i normally just use screenshots) and it automatically saves the screenshots in a folder of the same name, and names each picture starting with the name of the game. For some reason Dauntless is tagged “Archon” in both of those instances. I wonder if that is a name of the build?

6 comments / Add your comment below

  1. I hear you on this front. Every time the new hype game is making its rounds and everyone is talking about it, I’m over here playing years-old games like the Bioshock Trilogy. While I’m still playing EQ2 it’s been slow going… I’m just about done with the prereqs to get into the new zones, but hey, at least it’s not years-old content at this point.

    I haven’t heard of Dauntless, but I’m very tempted to pick up Monster Hunter World (because I don’t have anyone to compete with for PS4 time) when I get paid tomorrow. It’s been a long while since I purchased a game at full price and this close to launch. It looks like a cool game but I still don’t know if I’m going to go for it, as I’ve never played a Monster Hunter title before. I guess we’ll see how I feel once the money is burning a hole in my pocket!

  2. If Archon was their previous idea for a game name (and already used in the executables), they probably realized there was already a game named Archon for the ZX Spectrum. And since it was published by EA, EA probably still has the rights for the name and would sue their butts off. But that’s a theory.

  3. I’ve been following Dauntless for a while now, specifically because of the MHW PC delays. It’s certainly in a better spot today than it was before. There’s a fluid complexity that exists in MHW, and yes, the combo locks are part of it. That means that some weapons have a much higher skill ceiling that others.

    Reddit is like an echo chamber for this game…and videos aren’t exactly brimming with fun. In MHW, while in combat, I am literally on the edge of my seat. I don’t yet see that in some of the vids, but then again, I’m not on the controls.

    1. It’s not there yet. It could be, but the initial design is very basic and can’t see it growing leaps and bounds through the stretch here. Open beta is soon.

      1. If it’s open beta, then they are in bug fix mode and tweaking, not system development. Well… they can either launch early with a half caked system and try to beat MHW PC audience, or delay a year and pick up the scraps following. Not an easy choice… especially for what seems a small team.

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