Dauntless Reforged is a massive free expansion that looks like a sequel

Dauntless Reforged screenshots

Previously, Dauntless worked by making the main town of Ramsgate act like a glorified lobby, with vendors and quest givers who would then send you on missions. The environments were bright, colorful, and fun to watch, but ultimately existed as simple large arenas for boss fights. You find your target, kill them, and you’re sent back to town. There was little incentive to explore and once the boss was dead you had no reason to stay.

Reforged doesn’t completely rewrite the script, but it modifies it heavily with the new Hunting Grounds event. In Hunting Grounds, there are 18 different Craft Islands (one of which is a whole new type of biome) that each look like real-life environments with more than just boss fighting. They are full of new plants, little creatures to fight in addition to bosses, treasures to find, and more.

This concept of “stay and kill” is a big part of Reforged. With this update, Dauntless will largely change from a single mission-based queuing system that includes individual boss fights booked by loading screens and city tours to let you fight multiple monsters. in a row before heading back to the center of the main town.

Naturally, one of the issues that will come up with a longer hunt duration is that you will run out of heals and other consumables much faster this way, which is why they also introduce supply crates to be used outside. of combat. Everyone has at least one, and you can deploy them to restock your consumables and even modify your loadout if you want to so you don’t get stuck with material that doesn’t do the job.

Once you have completed a hunt or a quest on a hunting ground, your loot and rewards appear in overlay on the right, then you are allowed to continue hunting without needing to return to town. From there, you can look at Points of Interest (indicated by question marks (?) Or diamond-shaped icons on your compass) to find more things to do, like public events going on. dynamically on the map.

During my demo, we completed the main hunt and then found a lone heroic Riftstalker to face afterward. These creatures are tricky because they can gradually enter and exit portals – like Phantom Ganon’s fight in Ocarina of Time – making it difficult to predict which direction they will come from. Two tough fights in a row like this depleted our supplies, so we dropped a crate of supplies to get ready for more hunting.

After spending some time on a Hunting Ground location, public events also begin to appear. You will see a blue arrow of light shoot up to the sky. Once we arrived we realized that the event was an “ether wave” that gradually attracts all types of hostile creatures over time. And yes, the types of creatures he can attract include Behemoths. Sometimes even more than one Behemoth – at the same time – which happened to us. Somehow we survived and finished it all and took this opportunity to come back down to enjoy the perks of our work, such as public events that dynamically unfold on the map.

The other main part of the Reforged update is the complete overhaul of the Slayer’s Path progression system. Instead of being a linear progression, you can now make leveling choices every step of the way, like a more traditional skill tree, which adds more variety of build and customization to the exact way your slayer plays in relation to others. It even includes new features such as gliders that allow you to travel across islands much faster.

When you combine the drastically different format of Hunting Ground with the complete overhaul of Slayer’s Path progression along with all of the other recently released content, Dauntless is shaping up to be one of the best free-to-play games. Reforged is an update robust enough that it probably could have been saved for a full sequel, but they’re giving it away for free anyway and it’s pretty commendable.

David Jagneaux is a freelance writer for IGN. Talk RPGs with him on Twitter at @David_Jagneaux.