GDC Plays Dauntless with Phoenix Labs

twitch channel my name is Brian Francis I am a contributing editor at kamasutra comm I'm a community manager with GDC I am the invisible voice inside your head who just realized he needs to tweak the volume on something and I'm going to do that but we are here today playing a game called dauntless it's been out it's been playable for a bit but I just launched formerly back in May we are playing on ps4 to death weird playing dauntless because we have the opportunity today to talk to some fine folks from Phoenix Labs about the game's design development those fine folks from Phoenix Labs are in the lower left-hand corner of the screen they will be taking your questions I want to quickly go queue up for something while IQ up I need to introduce one other face in that corner because he's here and deserves to be acknowledged for his time Alex how are you doing I'm doing all right you don't need to acknowledge me you just need to pay me on that I'm all about it I don't that's true no I'm paid by the fine folks behind a

game developers conference kamasutra calm and a number of other fine properties my name is Alex Farah I'm contributing editor at gamma seizure calm and I work here with Brian on this fantastic G is the twitch channel but more importantly you want to know about who our guests are so guess this is gonna be tricky because you're all equally fantastic let's try to start here on my left I'm doing great how are you guys could you choose yourself first please I'm sure the audience knows you yeah my name is Sarah Hauer I am the design director at Phoenix labs working on dauntless thanks and then below you we have Nick hey everyone I'm Nick director of marketing here at Phoenix labs Andy is also hanging out with us in the call Andy how you doing I'm great yeah I'm and ebert I am Dee had a PR here at Phoenix labs Oh kind of a question for Hunter and Nick although Nick you just said you've been around a while so you maybe you planned it could you explain I think this is an interesting case where Dulles has grown

with Phoenix Labs as a company it's kind of a case where it feels a lot like when we were streaming astronaut they said on the stream was we basically built the company like to build the game in a specific way where they were talked about like the team the tech the engineering could you explain the origins of Phoenix labs and why you just had to make a game why you will decide to get into the Dauntless business I guess yeah for sure so we've been making games together albeit not at Phoenix labs for better part of a decade myself Jesse Sean Robin the co-founders bunch of other folks here have all collaborated on franchises like Mass Effect League of Legends and really the reason why we started Phoenix Labs is we wanted to strike out on our own and create a new game and a new experience that brought people together and point in case we didn't actually have like dauntless as a concept when we started the studio we had this vision in

this philosophy that games bring people together and shared experiences bring people together and you know we were just talking about kind of the early days of World of Warcraft and like those great moments where you walk through storm wind and there's this onyxia head-mounted or like guild first defeating a raid like capturing those like awesome moments was something that we wanted to do and from there you know we had a couple different concepts coincidentally at the time we were playing I think it was Monster Hunter 4 for you at the time and we were all really enjoying it but really not enjoying like trying to get the shared experience aspect going together on the DS form factor and we saw the opportunity to create dauntless and from there I mean it's it's been a living breathing game for multiple years now and it's just been a lot of iteration a lot of patching a lot of feedback from the community to help improve the game experience into what you're playing

today yeah I am a real quick frame I'm watching this is mainly about game development game designs that you have any questions for the developers about anything about dauntless specifically about its design development just put them in chat will relay them I want to know a bit about the networking side of this thing I mean like that's sort of the most exciting part about dullness is there's been a lot of press around the game being one of the very if not the first cross-platform like fully you know progression tracking online game for ps4 and Xbox one PC and everything else I'm curious to know a bit about how that came to be and sort of how did you think about designing the network systems based on your experience with games like Monster Hunter yeah I mean it's a great question and as soon as we basically had our what we call the vertical slice experience of Dauntless so like pick a weapon fight a behemoth rinse repeat the first that like one of the first things we did was get it off

of running on a local machine here and get it running on servers online and I think it was 2000 and what year are we in nineteen so it's either 2014-2015 one of the first play tests we did was over the holiday break in December and we set a goal upon ourselves that we were all gonna leave the office we were all gonna go home to our families for a couple weeks but we wanted to play the game and we had to have things like your inventory quest and progression the different behemoth hunts all of it running on servers online through cloud computing so that we could effectively do that and not have to be in the office so kind of since like really early on dauntless has been a quota fingers live game even if it hasn't been like open access to you know the public in the early years yeah so that was sorry go ahead I'm just curious what you specifically mean by cloud computing yes so we use we use a combination of cloud services like

Google and like Amazon you know like AWS to do things like matchmaking player inventories the game data itself progression like these are all kind of like workers running around in the background that are running on servers not stored inside our four walls so that we can offer the game effectively like worldwide you know kind of a limitation of having like the data center is that everyone has to come to you and it was important to us that we go to the players so we have servers in North America South America Western Eastern Europe Australia kind of like strategically situated all over the world so that no matter where you are you get a really good connection to dauntless and can play it with your friends nice I am there's some good question of the chat and I want to get to them book real quick before we get off this tell me whether any what sort of unique challenges that you run into when you're trying to build a system like that the runs server-side and

tracks things like inventory across like it seems all accounts I write it's all type of persons account regardless of platform was that specifically challenging than any interesting way to try and get that working across all these different platforms yeah I mean it would be a great question for our tech director who's unfortunately not with us today but when I go abductor server engineering just pull em in yeah Brian you're on stream answer this really good question yeah I mean it was it it's super challenging in so much that there are just a lot of systems all talking together all at once in terms of building and scaling I mean we had of not not in a bragging way but we had a lot of players show up and the first I mean since launch really but in the first like week two weeks we had a ton of players show up and really stress how we built and architected everything but we had a lot of partners show up to help us figure out how we scale the game from you know where it was a couple months ago to the reality of you know millions

of players today and you know a lot of these problems you we did a lot of like bought testing and swarm testing to like oh what happens when a million people hit the matchmaking API all at once but in reality like that can only get you so far it's not until you have real players doing real behavior against your game on live that you get like a true sense of how the platform holds up and a lot of these times it's not like a problem that you'll see immediately like sometimes services don't fall over gracefully like instantly and you're like oh that's a problem let's fix it it sometimes takes days and weeks for things to kind of unravel and it was just you know like we had a war room situated in the office here and you can imagine like the command center from 24 we had a lot of monitors with like up to the second game health so as soon as we saw like the slightest indication that something was degrading you know a swarm of Engineers would hop

on it and fix it as quickly as possible just for the for the cross-play components alone right like it's insanely complicated when you think about just something as simple that's like Oh a friends list yeah you got your list and you add your friends it's like well what about how you know the playstation friends list works how does that integrate with your friends list what about the you know all of these different platforms handle all that stuff different different ways they all have very strict guidelines that they want us to follow to ensure quality for their platforms but they conflict sometimes if they are different from the way something might be architected so a lot of people had to spend a lot of time and like super smart people like tackling a really big problem it's just like you know super gratifying to see all of those pieces come together but it even gets like reflected in like the UI is need to be able to accommodate like different presence of like unlike different platforms and like well you

can't show this icon in this case because that's against this compliance thing but you can show this icon so we need a proxy icon for and like it like the specific like details thereof following all of those rules and making it work and being a good player experience is just like it is not to be underestimated like the effort that goes into making cross play work at all and their absolute heroes on the team that manage to like pull that stuff together and I am I'm continually in awe of the all of those boxes they needed to check yeah totally I mean we could it seems like a complicated and fascinating topic enough that we could spend the whole hour talking about it I promise we won't but as long as we're talking about sort of how you guys got ready for launch and I he tested everything this feeds really well into a question here from fantasy Meister they seem to think that you had a pretty smooth launch compared to much bigger publishers and they want to know how'd you pull it off especially considering the fact that it's cross play that is super flattering because at

times it felt pretty hectic around these parts but I mean it was a lot of planning honestly like we quite literally have a scrum team here at the studio called ready for scale and it was I mean that was their their mandate was to to make sure that our launch one off his smooth as possible that's not to say we didn't have the the occasional bug show up for the occasional outage that we had to jump on but that team spent the I mean hunter correct me if I'm wrong but like the better part is six months preparing for this moment and we had separate teams put together for cross play specifically separate teams together for consoles specifically I mean it's been a work in progress since gosh like I mean right around this time last year we you know as soon as we got the PC open data out and in the players hands we took up the torch on console so careful planning and collaboration it's kind of cliche to say it but we I mean we've spent a lot of

time just preparing for the launch itself yeah and like one of the like philosophically like you need to and I've I've heard some like my co-workers espouse this value is like you don't try to plan do all if you're planning such that like nothing goes wrong because things will go wrong you put so much more of your focus in what are we how are we going to react when things do go wrong because it absolutely happens and so like if a pod falls over and a bunch of people get booted out to the main menu like how can we handle that elegantly how can we be ready how can we see that when that's happening and spool up another pod to replace it it's much it's it's really a philosophical I think a value set that those guys sort of and ladies rally behind as a way to approach the problem because you just

you just can't you can't get everything right you can't predict all of the things that are gonna happen it's impossible nice yeah I wonder if we should dig into the design of it because this game is it's just a fascinating piece to crack apart Brian what do you what do you what's your what's your deal now you like to guns you just cool to guns on fire no problem I would categorize this game as having a very nice efficient - compared to my old MMO days we talk we talk it's a forehand which is you choose the weapon you choose a loadout and then you choose the kind of boss you want to fight and then from there the bosses have these nice like this fight is very into every boss every monster you go to hunt is very boss fight in that they have animations you are trying to pin down and positions and patterns you have memorized bodies my friends my anonymous internet friends here appear to be much more experienced at this than I am but you then just trying to learn and pick

up like these encounters makes feel like something you're playing sort of on your home console as opposed to sort of MMO bosses I'm used to which sort of feel like things that exist on here like it feels like a live it feels like a live AI creature that is complicatedly interfacing with everything I'm doing as opposed to something that's just for checking if I hit it or not yeah it's it's it's hard to sort of pin down that in words right but it feels if she does a little more dynamic and active than a Wow lost battle right if it's a little bit more like a dark soulless fight or something yeah let's dig into that for a minute how did you guys like this game feels much more focused and dynamic than even a monster hunter or some like that where you have to chase a monster from zone to zone and wound and weaken them can you talk a bit about sort of where that comes from and sort of the thinking behind that idea the the encounters are like I think you hit it hit the nail on

the head where it's like Monster Hunter at Dark Souls style like action combat where you're you know worrying about where's the where's the creature gonna be how do I roll how do I get my iframes up so that I don't get hit by that attack and I can continue to like DPS the guy down at the same time we really like and on some of our more complex encounters to integrate things like raid mechanics where you will have to like avoid particular zones or you'll have to like a grab this buff and this buff is really useful to be able to like you know deal more damage to this time who's gonna get the buff and we're working on actually some some new modes now that are that'll increase the number of like unique modifiers and behaviors that are on encounters to be able to mix them up and have them be different like that em remain encounter that you just had is like a very learn Abal you know master able event and we want we want that right we want you to be able to come back to it later and you know see you

got the c-track or you got the B record now you got the S Plus rank because you take no damage and you have your DPS up times really good because you know where the you know boss is gonna be but we want to you know continue to challenge people so it's like how can we develop you know behaviors and content that we can layer on top of these so that we can remix those fights in interesting ways oh that's so interesting I am can you talk a bit about sort the the design philosophy that goes into creating a boss like this or an encounter like this I mean it seems to be significantly more intense than your average like even single player boss fight with different levels and different approaches and you always have a different set of players in the mix so I tell me just as a like a ballpark like how long does the team spend designing and tuning a specific encounter I would say that a specific you know a specific behemoth will take you know somewhere between three to five months somewhere

you know in that in that zone and that's that's going along a long sort of I don't want to call it a assembly line because that's relatively diminishing but it it has a lot of different stages of development right it will start off and it'll be something you know what field do we want to evoke you know what are the you know what's the tone of this encounter is it a majestic beast or is it stalking you or like what kinds of what kind of vibes do we want to give the players and then it goes into okay what what moves you know will will sort of reflect that tone that we're trying to hit what okay it's very stompy so like we want to figure out some AoE moves etc and we we developed that toolkit and there are some things that are true across all of our behemoths where we're like okay well what happens when he enters his rage state and then we can you know decide some interesting new mechanics that get layered on when they add to the rage state when they hit

particular damage taking thresholds and they really want to you know fight back against the Slayers so okay this scary move sort of gets like added into their toolkit at this point and so like it will accept the encounter and then they enter their aether state because their blaze behemoth and you'll start shooting a bunch of you know blaze blaze attacks at you and we we go through that process of you know identifying all of the different moves that will make up that tone and then obviously it's up to a pretty big team of you know modelers and animators and effects artists tech artists to to make that come to life with the designer trying to tweak into in the behavior all the way all the way to the end yeah what do you think makes a good a good encounter like what do you what do you what is your ideal challenge for the player what are you trying to create with each one of these beasts I think it sort of changes on where like we think a lot about the funnel of a new player

obviously you know into into your game and the journey that they're gonna go on and so what's appropriate for somebody early you know it's gonna be like okay we need to teach you how to interrupt a behemoth so we have that that fire dog that we just saw has this very interruptive a moment where it'll charge at you in certain attacks make it get staggered and fall to the ground and you get a big DPS window so that that encounter is like all about that mechanic but then there are late-game encounters where it's like okay this bug is really hard to hit and shoots a million lasers at you and it's like okay the the key here is that we want it to feel more like a bullet hell game or something like that where you're doing a lot of dodging and their beams and their projectiles and there's more beams but they do this this behavior instead and so that's all about dodging and like you know and like learning these these particular behaviors and patterns and so all the encounters are sort of trying to

do something different but I would say that you know if we can hit on like great mechanics and on great action combat with like dodging and strafing then we're hitting a sweet spot that I think makes dauntless sort of sort of special yeah yeah and I kind of said we're mentioning earlier this game feels it feels quick it feels responsive dynamic it feels very different from a lot of sort of multiplayer boss games that I played in the past so I'm curious why do you think that is it's just the the progress and broadband internet or is there something specific you guys did or number of specific choices choices you made to make this game feel and be so responsive oh okay yeah just go ahead and jump in on a couple of thoughts I mean I think a lot of it has been just kind of our focus on the type of gameplay experience we wanted to create like we're big fans

of high fidelity like pixel perfect dodging pixel perfect attacks when ye like you just saw like we just did like a perfect dodge roll through that nashor attack like feel super good when you master that skill but to support that obviously we have to you know to your point like structure the game in a way that supports that kind of play style and yeah I mean just kind of from day one we we didn't want to have like the tank and spank will be finger I'm gonna stop doing Cody fingers we're gonna we didn't want to do the the tank and spank style thing where it's just like you know a number calculator flying up while you're hitting this raid boss waiting for the next phase to go off we wanted to capture that like really good feeling of leaking like blood-borne Dark Souls Dragon's Dogma we're like dodges feel good blocking feels good and you're rewarded for that execution in that mastery and a lot of those capes are single-player right so it's it's it's simply like bringing that kind of

gameplay into a multiplayer space that I think makes it makes it a little bit different like a lot of those multiplayer games that that have encounters like this might be a shooter right but but aren't necessarily that style of action damn nice there's a fantastic question here in chat let me grab it chalky wants to know what are the challenges that comes a lot of the challenges you faced when it came to keeping framerate decent on consoles I am not the right person to ask like but there are there are a lot of if there's certainly a lot of performance optimizations that that had to be done by technical artist types that understand how to how to speak to that you know more eloquently but the optimization process not it's not something that you typically front-load in a game right like that would be that might be an interesting philosophy to adjustment to think about but usually you're like let's get it playable let's like it

doesn't matter like hide the polygons have it like your polygon count like sins will not be seen by the player you can get high geometry in places it's fine we'll fix that later and that you do get to that point where it's like okay we have to do a lot of cleanup of a lot of a lot of things that we did to get the game playable quickly - to nail the gameplay and we all as like developers right have really beefy machines that our companies provide to us - and it's really easy in the dev process to just like not think about that because you don't experience it and then some sometime over the course of the project sounds like we've got the min spec box right and that gets marched into the office and plugged in and everyone's like oh like okay like let's try to figure out what what do we need to do now now that we know what we want our game to look like what we want our game to play like how are we gonna make it fit and so that's just the process of cleaning up a bunch of stuff and that's also sometimes changing mechanics to

accommodate like we are in a or in a place like right now where you know you you potentially need to tune down some kind of mechanic that is emitting like a lot of particles so we're really happy with the way this looks right now we don't really have the time to refactor it so okay let's just tune down the number of volcanoes that hellion could spawn at once and that will mate it gets approve that fight is very hard the fight is also hard and so it's it's sort of a it's sort of a give-and-take with with a bunch of different different disciplines to hit that stuff it's it's a continuing like ongoing effort like we are not we are not easing up we still we still are doing work on on performance that I imagine will continue to for a while yeah and to kind of build on that just a little bit you know hunter hunter hunched on it like a lot of the machines that we use here at the office or really beefy and run the game really well

so it's kind of easy to lose sight that you know a lot of folks I mean I think one of the the most predominant GPUs that runs dauntless on PC is Intel integrated which you know a lot of the work that we did for console has helped us actually drive down and optimize our min spec on PC so we kind of we get a lot of like win wins there and even as it relates to the Nintendo switch version which we're working on right now we debuted a couple weeks ago at e3 we had to do further optimizations to get it running smoothly on the switch but we were able to take those learnings and pipe them back to the console version into the PC version so any time we kind of get a win on any platform as to how to optimize something like the effects or particles we're able to kind of share that across all the platforms because you know to your point earlier it's cross play it's all one build so what we do on one platform has to roll out and apply to the others as well yeah it

feels like it's like a lot of deaths who want to get their games on switch are already on it or are well on the way but I'm curious for those who haven't based on your current work like is there any advice and give to other developers who are working on switch games are there you know original games reports about what you've learned about how to build and adapt your game for that platform we're still pretty early on like we've been dedicated to developing on switch for maybe a couple months now if that so I would I will caution that anything that I say it should not be best practice because we haven't quite executed yet but we chose to partner with iron galaxy to help us code EV the switch version they've done phenomenal job with other games like Skyrim Diablo bringing it to the switch and they have a lot of expertise into the you know not only like the console and the hardware but also the form factor and we wanted to effectively tap into that expertise

and help us deliver something unique and memorable on the switch as well I feel like one of the reasons this the switch is not too overly philosophize but one of the reasons before switch the switch it's a successful rightous that it can it has a factor that totally befits hardcore hardcore games right like I remember like I've developed games for for the week like back in the day right and that it's very if that is a very unique platform that lets you do a lot of interesting things but it also does not let you take thing here and put it on there right because it's like well how does that work with the motion the sensor bar right and that like you just simply can't do things like that but for the switch right it's like it's got the sticks it's got the buttons in the same layout it's actually like relatively it's not as big of a departure as it would have been historically to think about the like the Nintendo platform has really fundamentally different that yeah

the PlayStation of the Xbox yeah totally Bryant you are killing it on stream right now is that you're using I'll let you focus on that um yes let's talk about the design I'm curious to know you know one of the things that caught my eye about this game when it launches is free-to-play for me it's very much like Monster Hunter which I loved with a deep passion for about 20 hours and then I was done so but like another thing about it was that you know it seemed like in a lot of the marketing materials there was a lot of hype around like a smooth progression curve with a lot of like really challenging stuff near the end for high level players and it you know it was pitches game that has you know multiple layers and depths of content for players depending on how much the how far they want to go now that you're like you know my about a munch Wow about a month out of munch

he's thinking about lunch over there I'm getting real hungry earlier but now here about a month out from launch I'm curious to know how is your progression plan and your how is the game stood up to the players basically like how quickly are they getting through the content based on your expectations and how is that inform the way you design the game that's a great question I think generally so so we've been testing progression for like for a while and we we had a very big progression revamp to the to the game right before launch so we we were able to analyze a lot of the player behavior ahead and so this is our you know most finely tuned iteration of the progression of dauntless and it will continue to evolve and change but we had a lot of data to look at and a lot a lot of you know player sentiment to analyze to be able to get to where we are right now which has been a lot a lot closer

than you know we have been historically which is one of the advantages obviously of having a you know a a beta environment you know closed alpha environment to just be able to accumulate that learning over time but yeah the the ramp for a new player is really is a really tricky thing for a game that is intending to be extremely skill based like you don't want to you don't want to challenge the player too quickly you also don't want to make the player feel like there's nothing for them to like sink their teeth into at the same time like if you imagine somebody who comes across dauntless on you know a stream somewhere it's like oh that game looks interesting I'll give it a try I've never played games of that genre put them into the same progression as I am the king of Dark Souls you know and I am I'm a master of you know I

framing stuff put those players through the same progression that's a really tricky that's a really tricky thing because that the iframe king is gonna be like it's a game for babies the other person is gonna be like this is legitimately a new thing that I'm trying to wrap my head around as a gamer period and so the goal with a lot of our progression rework was to let players paced themselves through the game a little bit more at their own speed so you can blitz through the progression pretty quick Klee you can also find a lot of side quests to do and get your feet and not necessarily push yourself to that next behemoth if you don't feel ready for it a lot of a lot of what we have to do also is think about matchmaking queue health right and so there are a lot of different monsters to fight in the game and if you if you make people you know skill out of these too quickly then they

sit here and like we want you to be able to find a party really quickly so how do we incentivize people to keep doing this by it oh but then it's boring for those people so how do you incentivize them more and so there's there a lot of different there are a lot of different variables to take into account and at the end of the day you're usually sacrificing one or the other there's nothing that's perfectly gonna hit all of them but letting the player drive their progression more with more agency themselves is much better than a really prescriptive campaign type encounter which is what we migrated away from in our in our previous previous iteration yeah makes a lot of sense it sounds like right if I understand you right there's a there's a core progression that has a lot to do with skill and kind of thing and then there's there's lots of side stuff to do for people who want to break from that or time to practice things or just to not be under that kind of pressure yeah I know you can live in that ecosystem for a while without moving forward and it's okay and it's

still fun and there are still objectives for you yeah I tell me um you know since you've launched have any players sort of capped out have they haven't gotten to what you consider endgame content yet it's tricky I would need to I would need to look because we did not do a complete progression wipe at launch to like take all of our our legacy players and and delete all their progress so those people like we added a bunch of new systems like the masteries the mastery system for example is one of the longest tail things to do in our game which is essentially like have you crafted every weapon have you crafted every armor set have you interrupted this behemoth a thousand times have you like it's like a achievement system and also like core like player level tracker like rolled into one and so there are people that have maxed out that's have played you know an ungodly number of hours since launch and why we're continually on the grind to keep adding new systems and new content new

behemoths new weapons to the game and will continue to do so absolutely but there are there are probably still some things that that no player has managed to check off every single box I've yet to see a naked no hit run of res carry yet so there's still that somewhere it's it kind of to build on that a little bit in addition to kind of what I would call like the core experience to dauntless which is fight these behemoths craft these weapons to get better stronger so that you can fight the next set of behemoths Hunter in the design team are already hard at work on what is going to be kind of a new gameplay experience that sits alongside the core call it like story and progression we're gonna be launching it in mid-july comes complete with its own like season and like heralding all this new content and stuff but effectively it's going to be what is like this trials mode and

what hunter mentioned before is looking at ways that we can kind of flip what the player knows about dauntless on its head like oh I know ember main he's the the fire kitty who charges that I have to interrupt him well good thing I'm good at interrupting oh wait why are there thunder clouds everywhere wait why are there thunder totems everywhere what's going on this is so much more challenging now and the point of that mode is to give players who have maxed out on progression a weakly reason to come back and a weekly challenge for them to overcome nice yeah do you feel pressured at all to keep the game I mean clearly you feel there's a demand for content that you must feel right there's a voracious hunger for new systems new monsters that kind of thing do you feel do you boy do you think you're working more now that it's live then we were when it wasn't live or less does that make sense like is it more work to support a live game than it is to develop a live game or vice versa I

think yours there's definitely more gravity to it right like when something happens on live and you know there's millions of players playing the gravity of that situation is much more pronounced than say like you know in the in our previous pre-launch realm in early access where we had you know tens of thousands hundreds thousands at peak sometimes I don't know if it definitely I wouldn't say it's easier or harder it's just different if I can use that as a cop-out sure yeah I asked because you know this whole year I've been thinking about that story about fortnight and how they you know they they famously have a very quick update schedule and the story came out a little while ago that was saying that that's due to the fact that they're working way too hard they're crunching all the time or at least some people dare say that specifically yeah reported that the QA team was working at what they classified

as a very high level thank and then and corollary to that which is I'm sure something you all have watched from afar is their competitor direct competitor apex legends has been mocked by certain people not by me I love that game for not updating as fast you know on a weekly basis like for tonight does like Battle Royale it seems right now the people playing in that genre want things as fast as possible certainly I do you know I like I like apex I want new content but do you think has there been any change as live game developers do you think and how your audiences how fast they want content I guess um I think and hunter can elaborate I got so there's two points in there to unpack the first one I'll let hunter elaborate on which is I think there there's kind of multiple ways that we can design content for players creating a behemoth creates you know a not a finite but let's call it 20 to 30 hours worth of gameplay for a player you know you got the lesser version to beat the regular

version the dire version the heroic the heroic plus version then you got to craft all the gear out of it because you're completionists and must have everything so that kind of has like a finite experience inside of it but to hunters credit and his team's credit he spent a lot of time thinking about designing kind of like at the system level so that when we you know do things like add new weapons or add new behemoths okay how are we thinking about piping our learnings and these designs back into previous experiences so that with each new behemoth we create we use the knowledge and the design there throughout the rest of the game and then elsewhere I think the second point to make there is we you know it's the topic of crunch and the topic of work culture in the games industry is always such a tough subject because you hear these horror stories about people working you know 80 to 100 hour weeks never seeing

their families having to to go to doctors mid crunch and do I mean to be totally transparent like we pushed really hard leading into launch for a couple weeks always in a very respectable sustainable manner like we like we more than anything at this studio believe in sustainable game development we treat each other like family we look out for each other if someone's having a day we you know get them out of here we figure out how we can cover for them because ultimately like I mean just personally and candidly speaking when Jesse picked up the phone to talk to me about joining the company he said Nick I want to retire with you like I want to make games until I retire and I want you to be a part of it and that's like I mean the reason why I picked up the phone and talked to Annie this is like dude I want to do this with you until we retire like we want to make games because we love making games I don't want to do it with you because you're an awesome dude and I want to support you and I want to

support your journey and not retiring anytime soon no really well that that mentality in that respect for each other permeates every person and every team here at the studio that's fantastic I'm glad to hear it tell me is there anything specifically you how do you this is something comes up another conversation with developers and it's hard for anyone to talk about because so much of this industry is driven on true passion like people really want to make in and they really want came to that are incredible and often they will work very hard on them so at the city like how do you how do you manage that how do you when people are working how do you tell the difference between passionate work and overwork and like are there any specific systems or processes you have in place to control for that yeah I mean it is kind of a you know mentorship and managing teams is a very I'm sure you know very complicated you know it's lots of different opinions on how best to approach it and personally speaking I I don't know if

there's any one right way to do it but there's a reason why the studio is 90 people and not 2,000 people like we want to have a one-to-one relationship with each of our peers and just personally speaking like on the publishing team I spend a lot at like most of my time with my people like one-on-ones personal conversations mentorship like what do you want to do what's your passion in life how are you feeling about your work am i challenging you like that kind of that kind of relationship and that kind of behavior again is like it permeates every team inside the studio and it it starts with the top down like Jessie Sean Robin the other senior leaders at the company that's how I'm mentored and that is how I reflect that is how I mentor to the publishing team as well yeah fair enough I wonder last question what this now we'll move

on to I think we want to talk about some of this incredible art style here but you know I've seen that there's been a high influx of players I think you guys are in five million six million something like that the numbers look pretty good for this game has that changed the pace of your production no do you feel any pressure to ramp up now that the game is sort of taking off or is it still business as usual a little like column a column B I mean we were we crossed a 10 million unique players I can you correct me if I'm wrong I think it was 10 around III a couple of weeks ago which is a tremendous accomplishment and everyone here is super proud of it and it I don't know if it change I don't like using the urgency word but I don't know if it changed the urgency at which we work but it certainly changed how we deployed some of our efforts and our resources like to like to expand on that

a bit I think it was striking when the iron was hot like we we set up this launch we believe that end of May was going to be perfect for us as a studio and a good time for the industry and it turned out that both of those assumptions were accurate and we're like okay the the strategy is sound it's time to double down now that we you know we've got everyone's attention and once playing the game the game is holding up people are having a lot of fun we're getting you know 80s and 85 s on our review scores like we're firing on all cylinders now is the time to double down on it because we have a captive audience essentially to talk about dauntless right on there's a question in chat I want to get back to ever let it sit here for a while but it's good fantasy my sister wants to know how many art-style did you go through we're setting on this one oh if any that predates me that also predates me as well and I'm looking over my shoulder are our directors not at his desk oh man oh yeah I mean I can I can touch on it a little bit like we we have an

art book and is not me shilling the art book but it's a great exploration on how we discovered the style of dauntless and what was super important to us early on was having a more stylized appeal to the game rather than like is something like final fantasy that's hyper realistic like photo realistic visuals I love Final Fantasy that's not a knock on Final Fantasy because being a live game we knew this game was going to exist for you know five six seven ten years potentially and we wanted to create a style that would stand the test of time and not be a reflection of the tools that we had at the time when we created the game essentially yeah it seems like it would do you a favor in terms of making the game give you more longevity and giving it more of a like iconic look that doesn't necessarily so fall by the wayside as the years go by I was distracted because chalky here has a really good question are there any interesting systems when you're on fire

to put out the fire I just I am having a really hard time listening when you're on fire and how how long has that been going on for Hunter Tomatoes it's just just need to I just need to say that I'm really sorry all right just tuck tuck and roll wrap this keep rolling yeah nice sorry yeah big shot off the Brian it's hard to play a video game and talk on stream at the same time especially when you're supporting a team of three other people you're killing it chalky wants to know are there any interesting systems or programming languages the power the backend of Dauntless so anything interesting go on back there any funny stories a weird things going on that is we are now completely outside my realm of knowledge words I I know like two lines of my sequel drop table that's about it

more than me yeah yeah but that's their circle there's certainly a lot I mean I know we use a lot of Python a lot of it's the other one is how much I know about it I thought see a lot of Unreal blueprints yeah sure yeah well we should talk about something that you have a lot of experience with let's talk about getting this game out in front of people and publishing it I'm so curious to know why did you guys choose to work with epic on this yeah so we we've been using unreal even I mean before we worked here at Phoenix labs but when we decided on using Yui for for dauntless I mean we began like a really good relationship with everyone at epic so we had our like we had a pre-existing relationship with them and over a year ago epic started sharing confidentially

their vision for what the next step for them was as a company you know like they've got fortnight they've got this massive not even game cultural experience happening right now and they wanted to find out what was the next big step for them so they talked about things like the store which they've launched they've talked about helping other developers bring their games to market you know there's a lot of great independent titles on the epic game store alongside you know the bigger titles like the borderlands of the world and as we talked with them about you know the future of dauntless and how we wanted to bring it to console this idea for cross play started coalescing between our team and their team and Tim Joe Hector everyone at epic was hugely supportive of it and wanted to find a way to make it work and essentially use us as the

like the vehicle to get like the first cross plague like the first game to launch with cross play as opposed to it being like an after-the-fact type deal with first party and it was yeah I mean it was it's cliche to say it but like we resonate with the type of people of epic the company that they are like a lot of our philosophies are their philosophies their approach to game development very similar to ours and our goals were aligned and it just it made sense yeah I wonder it was it tricky like to go to the two stakeholders before launch or did you how did you just go through epic two to get all that stuff plugged in or did you have to go to Sony and Microsoft and actually talk to them directly about making this a cross play game at launch it was a little bit of both if I'm being completely transparent it was new for all parties involved so we were all kind of figuring out in real

time what was the best path forward so yeah like we talked to epic epic talk to first party we talked to first party all three of us talked together I mean at the end of the day the what was most important to us was kind of what we we talked about at the beginning of our chat was bringing people together with dauntless and it just felt really bad to us to say that but then not to have cross plague so I mean it's like literally we're like man the game is in open beta on PC what's next console okay and cross play like their console and cross play have always been married together because we we want to bring people together and we're really fortunate in that first party first party being Microsoft and Sony and epic all believed in that vision and we work together to make it happen do you think that would've been possible if you hadn't work for that me it's that's a tough question I mean it's

kind of a what-if scenario I mean everyone at Epic was super supportive I also don't want to undermine our own capabilities as a publisher and a developer to to get stuff done so I mean like I don't know if I could say yes or no but I can say that like if we didn't have epic it would have been a monumental task and they were there to support us every step of the way yeah I asked because you know the happiest videos out there and they're not thinking about to a cross play and launch and I sorta forgot trying to get a sense of what kind of a task it was how Herculean what went into it I wonder do you have any any advice or any tips for other developers might want to do the same thing in their own games yeah I mean kind of two things working with epic has been phenomenal and that's not that's not because I'm being paid to say that by a few I love working with those guys I talked to them every day I think what they are trying to do with the epic game store is great for the industry

they're adding they're adding competition to a space that desperately needs it competition only makes us better and the way that they treat their developers is much more game and developer focused I mean even looking at things like they're they're sliding royalty rate for games so for people who don't know if you want to use the Unreal Engine you have to pay the license it if you want to publish on the epic games so or they essentially waive the licensing fee as like a way to kind of deepen your partnership with epic so I'm a huge proponent of it in terms of like the how to get it done I think we're at a tipping point in the industry where games like fortnight rocket League leave minecraft has some elements of cross play dauntless and I believe Call of

Duty also announced cross play at e3 a couple weeks ago as well like the more games that have it the more of a precedent it sets and I think the more player expectations will be set there and I think that again that's all just gonna make us better as an industry I think there's a path there now right like and there was not a path there like when even when dauntless was like just getting started right that was not like a dream that you could necessarily have and it is so much easier of a thing to think about from the beginning to my point about technology and like design choices and just being able to accommodate multiple platforms like now games can't start and the env had be built from the ground up as a cross play cross play experience which is a super cool place to be you know in the evolution of our industry I think it's gonna also just open up much

more social games in general right like like you could just build it from the ground up knowing that you'll be able to do this thing on this phone and also on this xbox it's like that's a that's a new design space that we are just like just dipping our toe into it feels mmm yeah yeah I hope you're right we got to wrap this up in about 500 minutes so it was any good questions drop them in chat we'll do our best to get them in Bryan hey feel and yeah I burn questions no unfortunately not gonna start another hunt before we go because we these things are wonderful but they also take time thank you everyone a chat for reminding me about the reloading speed they have a lot of feelings about but fro yeah yeah yeah you can tell which I guess we can we can humor everyone man I had a question road maps I guess but I think we should humor chat with one question there's no questions about a god hand fix do you all have any opinions about

God hand tell me about God the Godhead is an exotic weapon in dauntless that lets you fire a laser beam and it's very cool and also it's a little broke right now and in our next patch it's fixed but the real bad thing is just that um you could shoot that beam forever enjoy that last yeah and while it lasts I think is I think we're patching it's literally Amaro yeah ours perfect what inspired the God Hand for our last time so we have this think we really want to chase loot in the game so it's like oh this weapon feels really really different and and part of that is I think partially inspired by destiny exotics um like they're they're just like super fun to collect this weapon it has this like unique behavior and you know unique art and it feels like this little special

thing that I like stumbled across and now is is like uniquely mine and so we have exotics that people can try to farm you know blueprints for later in the game so you have to go up against the hardest behemoths over and over to be able to have a chance of getting those exotics and the pike I'm not sure if we saw it on stream or not the pike also shoots a rocket so you stab stab stab charge up your ammo and then you can shoot a rocket which it drums behemoth steals damage etc but it replaces the rocket with a beam instead and we like in the same way that we like behemoth encounters to be you know modular such that we can remix them in interesting ways we just released our like weapon customization system so you can unlock mods that let you like tweak passive behavior of weapons and we also unlost unlocked that that's my own Ramos to lunch I promise

we let you be able to swap the specials so instead of shooting a rocket you're able to do like this this big buff zone if you want to play a horse support style with the weapon instead because we find that people really gravitate towards a weapon in the same way that's like I really like to play major I really like to play rogue it's like I really I'm a pike user and we want to offer as many choices to those Pike users as possible we don't want to have like 30 weapons and they're all really shallow because people identify so much with their weapon and that plays style that it affords we want all the weapons to actually go really deep so we're trying to introduce more weapons but we're also trying to enrich those weapon play styles over time that's a far more ramp Lee answer to what's a god hat even though I have more questions that I want

to ask the track has some great questions thank you all for watching thank you all for joining us on the GC twitch channel we super loved having you thank you to the Dauntless player base for dropping by and asking questions thank you for our normal viewers for coming by and asking questions if you liked this channel if you liked if you'd like if you're a bouncing person relates bouncing and goats which I'm just learning about in chat today but you also love game development please click the follow button because we are going live with lots of other interesting games throughout the summer throughout the fall throughout the winter as long as they keep letting me do it I'm gonna keep doing it I'm gonna keep asking developers questions and try and get interesting answers for you and learn give you share knowledge help other game developers make games that's kind of our goal here if you have other questions I've seen some stuff there's some more godhand ish questions around here Andy where should they ask them go to our Twitter play Dauntless you can also go to our reddit and our discord we have

pre active communities in both right on we would encourage you all to to check those out and from there all say is um because this is GDC we've got a long ways off to the next GDC feel free if you want to learn more I don't know if they're any Dauntless employed devs who've given GDC talks but there might be some in GDC vaults I've done a couple yeah they're in GCC vaults if not they might even be on the GTC YouTube channel and also you know you can join us a GC next year if you are a VR developer if you're working in VR AR AR we do have XR DC coming up at the end of the year when I'd love to see you there with that that's all I got have a good day everyone hey thanks for having us thanks thank you absolutely thanks for coming hi guys I play God Hand