Everyone loves a good bait-and-switch from a beloved franchise, be it Indiana Jones, Dragon Age, or even Dauntless. Beyond the knee-jerk reaction to dislike change, what is wrong with this approach? Let's look at Dauntless specifically.

TL;DR; Change can breathe new life into an aging product, but when it removes the core feature that drew its audience, change can be turned into a cynical cash grab.

I like to dabble in video games. I jokingly tell my friends and family that video games are my love language; and I really enjoy both sharing the games I like but also trying to help others connect to games I think they might like. At the start of the lockdowns, I used many of the twitter drop notices to buy PS5's for my siblings at a time when the hardware was either MIA or else being scalped for 5x the price. (I love my family, but I'm not spending 5x the price...)

It was around this time I installed Dauntless. The Reforged do-over had just dropped; and I had heard of this game for years but never tried it.

Veterans who played before this will tell you that Reforged was awful. I cannot say what came before; and even taking their word for it, I did not experience the version that came before.

In Reforged, the premise was to shift how the "endless grind" could be experienced by veteran players. For a new player, the experience brought about incremental challenges from level 1-20 so that a player could get to endgame in a short amount of time, learn the basics, get carried hard starting out, but then be someone who carried others in less than a month. I recall being hard carried by a player who seemed to get as much overhealth as I seemed to have damaged-health.

After a month, I started to learn where life on hit sources could be added to my gear, how to change my armor to get more passives that worked for my playstyle, and that it's ok to be a slower player, since a dead DPS does zero damage.

I managed to get swords and pikes to max reforge before my interest started to wane. Admittedly, Dauntless only managed to elicit about $15 worth of interest from me. While I would like to support F2P games, I believe that support should come from things I want cosmetically. I have an active aversion to anything that is pay-to-win or pay-to-overcome-arbitrary-shackling.

What is P2W vs F2P?

For example, many of the younger gamers complain that Throne and Liberty is "pay to win" based on the ability to spend $1000 for an endgame item. While I appreciate the younger gamers, they are wrong. You can get that same gear if you play long enough. The gear isn't required to play endgame. Your game-loop is unimpacted whether or not anyone on the team has paid for the gear.

P2W can strike up in many ways, but one of the more common ways it sneaks into the "F2P" games is through a forced shackling system. Want this item needed for endgame? "You can spend 100 hours in game or spend $19.95 to get it now." I have heard that Clash of Clans uses a model like that for speed building in a game centered around losing progress and time when another player raids your village. I have never played Clash of Clans despite the numbers of people all asking me to join their league.

By contrast, Path of Exile has one of the fairest of F2P models in the industry; and I have spent closer to $150 on their entirely F2P game. Don't get me wrong, GGG makes mistakes. Some leagues they release cause people to massively skip the 3-month league; and others are so good they bring it back and see the player count go back to historic peaks. GGG's philosophy is to mostly stick to MTX and some convenience with stash tabs. If you're on the fence, let me suggest you buy their $20 basic pack (one-time per account), get the MTX, and then spend the in-game paid currency on some QoL stash tabs. You don't need these to get to endgame, but the QoL convenience for a part of the game that has zero impact on the grind is amazing.

Back to Dauntless Awakening

In Dauntless Awakening (just released December 5, 2024), veteran players will once again have a different interpretation than new players.

For new players, while I do think the progression of the maps will make sense, the experience will cause players to quickly hit the wall long before reaching endgame. When a system no longer feels rewarding to play, new players will not stick around to find out what is behind the next curtain.

For veteran players, the problems stack up quickly with the afore mentioned bait-and-switch. Many cosmetics could be obtained for free if a player was dedicated; this specific reward structure kept the player count engaged because there was something for players who had played for years. At the moment, it appears this mechanic has been removed.

MTX have moved to loot boxes. Honestly? I'm disinclined to purchase loot boxes. A priori, I would not call this specific change "bad." PoE also has a loot box system, and there are some players who really really love paying for a random chance at a MTX they want.... The catch? GGG/PoE puts top tier cosmetics into theirs. Forte Labs with Dauntless put exceptionally bland MTX into their new system.

In the former versions of the games, all weapons were obtainable by playing the game, hunting specific monsters, and then craftable through NPC in town. In the new system, all but 13 weapons were removed from the game (down from something like 6 elements * 3 tier levels * 7 weapon classes....I'm sure these numbers are wrong); and of these 13, half of them are given for free while the others locked behind a pay-wall that appears to want $10 per weapon OR 10 weeks of playing for 1 hour each week.

You might ask, could one do all 10 hours at once? No. The weapon tokens are awarded in a weekly objective that gets replaced roughly every 2 months. While you could risk waiting until the end of the 2 month cycle, you might entirely lose interest in playing because the next dopamine hit was 8 weeks away.

Again, change can be good. While I am sure my numbers are wrong, let us imagine there used to be 126 weapons. Of these, honestly, there were probably only 21 that were worth using at endgame. However, because of progression, a player probably used or at least sought most if not all of the weapons for the class of weapon he most enjoyed.

The pursuit of things is a driving force for gamers; and the more in-game shinnies we can collect, the more accomplished we often feel. In Eldin Ring, for example, I have almost every weapon and armor set, including many of the ones where an armor piece has 5% drop rate or lower....looking at you female wolf riding archers in the frozen north.... I won't use most of the gear I have in Eldin Ring, but that easily added another 50 hours of play time to a game where I achieved the platinum trophy. (Apparently, 12% of all players get the platinum, this is a game players loved.)

By removing the item chase, Dauntless has removed a core engagement and retention pillar from their game without replacing it. I do not mean there is a new pillar that is simply weaker, Forte Labs removed a pillar from their game. Worse than that, for Veteran players, the old weapons are merely MTX; but for new players, there is presently no mechanism to obtain even the old MTX.

The Grind

It takes a very specific kind of player to enjoy the grind for the sake of grinding alone. For most of us, it is the necessary pressure valve to extend the tension in the pursuit of a loftier goal.

In Dauntless Reforged (prior release), a veteran player could go from level 1 to 20 (previous max) in an hour. To be honest, I was never this good, but even a more casual player who was endgame ready could do this in a very reasonable amount of time.

By contrast, in Dauntless Awakening, the experience curve quickly becomes logarithmic as the XP per hunt drops and the XP per level increases. After three days of moderate game play, I am level 30 out of 60. And as you would imagine, the monsters HP and toughness also nearly doubles every ten levels while your power increases at a decelerating pace....

Where does that leave us?

So, no item chase, and no feeling of progression....but there are new ways to spend money for items that are cosmetically bland or offer no new novel ways to play the game.

Resalient does not have the answer to this. I think the scenario is interesting. I could make some crappy comparisons to how "planned obsolescence" has ruined the industry for every industry. I could tell you how the chase for quick profits through cheap labor and buggy products ends up creating more ill-will; but I could also tell you that despite how predatory those systems are, Americans have refused to give up cheap products to make competing products.

Resalient won't solve your problems with overpriced and underperforming F2P games, but I will continue to build software that endeavors to give its customers more for their money and time with new features and enhancements. While we may in the future release tiered packages, Resalient will not downgrade its users just to cynically compel them to pay more.

Does your company deserve a software partner who will be promoting your best interest?