It was too easy to get hung up on a quest requirement or stuck on a hunt, especially if it was one you didn’t enjoy to begin with. “If you were stuck on a quest, you were just blocked,” says Greg. This made Dauntless a very linear experience - complete quest A to get quest B.Īnd there was another big issue with this single progression path. Because progression was completely gated by quest progress, you couldn’t see very far ahead of you. Quests were another barrier to visibility and planning. I can look at the node for Escalation or a sword mod and see exactly what it costs to unlock it.” Greater Agency “With the Slayer’s Path,” says Greg Hennessey, the system’s senior designer, “it’s all right there. While Mastery had the “I want to unlock this” piece covered, it lacked both a big picture view and a clear visual connection between its challenges and rewards. With the Slayer’s Path, it’s all right there. This is the kind of high-level view that lets you look out at something like Escalation and say, “I want to unlock that,” and know exactly what you need to get there. When we talk about “visibility,” we’re talking about your ability to see the big picture. Progression, then, had two big problems: visibility and agency.

Slayers had to go through a particular set of steps to move forward, and unless you were looking outside the game for answers, there were few ways to anticipate what lay ahead.

We knew that Mastery and quests were getting people through the game, but in a very linear, pre-determined way. In this case: “Where is progression falling short?” Most - if not all - of our work on Dauntless starts with a question we’re trying to answer. With Dauntless Reforged (1.5.0) just around the corner, we want to share an in-depth look at the Slayer’s Path: a new progression system launching with our update.

All the mods 3 progression