Dauntless is a free-to-play action role-playing video game developed by Phoenix Labs and published and distributed by Epic Games. The game initially launched in beta in May 2018 for Microsoft Windows. An early access version launched on May 21, 2019 for PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, including full support for cross-platform play, and was fully released for those platforms on September 26, 2019. A Nintendo Switch version was released on December 10, 2019. Versions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S were released on December 2, 2021. Gameplay Dauntless takes place in a fantasy setting, where a cataclysmic event has torn the world apart, releasing monstrous creatures known as Behemoths that prey on the surviving humans. Players take on the role of Slayers to take down Behemoths, collecting loot that they use to craft and upgrade weapons and equipment as to take down larger and more powerful Behemoths. While hunting, the game plays as a third-person action game; the player uses a combo system to attack the creature, while monitoring their own health and stamina gauge. Such hunts can take upwards of twenty minutes of in-game time to complete. The game can be played both as single-player, cooperatively in a party of up to four or in public cooperative instances of up to six people. Development Phoenix Labs was formed by former Riot Games developers Jesse Houston, Sean Bender and Robin Mayne, and as of January 2017 includes 40 developers formerly from BioWare, Blizzard Entertainment, and Capcom. While a small studio compared to the AAA studios they left, Houston said that they are positioned in a way to offer "a new, unique approach to crafting AAA experiences". Dauntless is the studio's first release. It was heavily inspired, as well as frequently compared to, Capcom's Monster Hunter series, which can see hundreds of hours put into a game by a player; the developers themselves have over a collective 6000 hours in various Monster Hunter titles. Dauntless was also influenced by Dark Souls and World of Warcraft. Houston credits Dark Souls specifically for helping to prove out that there is a market for "hardcore action games" focused on player versus environment encounters, which allowed them to take a safe risk on their approach to Dauntless. The game is intended to be played cooperatively as they see it as a social experience, and intend to add social/multiplayer interactions that are persistent in games