Horizon Hunters Gathering is a painful reminder of losing Dauntless, and one former dev says it's doing "everything I wanted to do"

I’m going to say it: I’m tentatively excited for Horizon Hunters Gathering. While its artstyle is a dramatic departure from what the series is known for, the new co-op game promises a fast-paced, Monster Hunter-adjacent experience, and that’s something I’ll always turn up for. In doing so, however, it also serves as a crushing reminder of Dauntless, a game I poured hundreds of hours into before it was ripped from our hands. I’m not alone in that feeling, as one former Phoenix Labs developer comments that the new Horizon game is doing “everything I wanted to do with Dauntless.”

Fighting the biggest mechanical beasties in the Horizon games, particularly with the difficulty notched up, comes surprisingly close to the feeling of a great Monster Hunter bout. So the prospect of Horizon Hunters Gathering, which adapts Aloy’s world into a co-op format with a little of Nightreign’s roguelike-adjacent sauce, is immediately appealing to me. Described as “tactical, reactive, and skill-based” by game director Arjan Bak, it’s got numerous weapons and classes that you’ll gradually upgrade as you plow through repeated foes.

If classic Horizon borders on Monster Hunter, the more cartoonish style of Hunters Gathering, combined with the fast-paced action, reminds me immediately of Dauntless. Phoenix Labs’ take on the formula never truly got the respect it deserved, and by the time it came to Steam it was already gearing up for a dramatic revamp to its fundamentals. That update would prove immensely unpopular, stripping out a lot of the hard work existing players had put in, and would ultimately lead to the game’s demise just a short while later.

It’s a shutdown I’m still not fully over, and seeing Horizon Hunters Gathering in action only served to reopen those old wounds. Dauntless might have been a more arcadey take on the Monster Hunter formula, but it had that special sauce. Its interrupt system would probably be too much for the Capcom series, but here it worked immaculately, and the weapon designs all had something unique that made them tick, whether it was hurling your battleaxe Kratos-style or blasting yourself out of the way of onrushing foes with the rocket hammer.

There’s a lot of that energy in the footage we’ve been shown of Hunters Gathering, with plenty of high-mobility skills along with its blend of ranged and melee attack options. Guerrilla also looks to be bringing some fresh ideas to the format; the ‘Machine Incursion’ game mode has you racing against a Nightreign-style encroaching barrier, while ‘Cauldron Descent’ is a multi-stage dungeon encounter where fights are interspersed with platforming challenges and environmental puzzles.

I’m glad there’s something new on the horizon (sorry). But it does make me mourn where Dauntless could be now if it had continued to grow, and former Phoenix Labs developer Christina Pollock appears to share that sentiment. “It’s vindicating to see another studio do everything I wanted to do with Dauntless but was repeatedly told no,” she writes via social platform X. “Games really do just live and die on their management.”

Responding to replies, Pollock says she feels Dauntless “lost its gameplay identity and narrative chasing Reddit’s approval and making poor prioritization choices and ego-driven monetization choices.” She explains that the Reddit crowd “isn’t representative of the player base. It’s a very small, very vocal portion, and they don’t actually even know what they want – they mostly just repeat whatever the streamer they’re following is [saying]. You can watch them play less when you give them what they want.”

Pollock also claims that one middle manager “told me all my pitches were bad, then stole them all and took credit for them internally to great praise, but then only shipped one and misunderstood what made it good so badly that it sucked anyway.” Unfortunately, with the vast majority of Phoenix Labs laid off in January 2025 and the studio now all but vanished, there’s little hope of any further details.

You can catch me pouring one out for Dauntless this weekend, then. With Gogmazios now present (and fearsome) in Monster Hunter Wilds, we’re not expecting any more additions to the base game, which has me seeking out other alternatives to scratch the itch. I’ve even returned to EA and Koei Tecmo’s Wild Hearts this week. For the time being, I’ll remain cautiously hopeful that Horizon Hunters Gathering can deliver that particular breed of ‘not quite Monster Hunter but in a way that stands out’ gameplay when it lands on Steam.