It’s not just the veteran players who are extremely upset at the Awakening update for Dauntless; the game’s former associate producer Jessie Leigh Gagnon has also spoken out against the update, expressing her dismay at the direction the multiplayer RPG has taken.
Gagnon, a former developer on League of Legends and one of the first devs on Dauntless, marks her deeply personal time with the game and Phoenix Labs, explaining how she was among the five developers who pitched the game to the studio and how burnout from working with Riot and on Dauntless caused her to take her leave from the studio for her health. “I cared that much about Dauntless surviving and shipping to the world – that I gave my body and mind to those critical days, and then spent the following six months in serious recovery,” Gagnon writes.
It’s because of that effort that she felt the need to call out the transformation that Dauntless took with the Awakening update.
“Dauntless today is no longer Free to Slay. They’ve gutted the core gameplay and crafting mechanics. The essence of the Slayers (who I named just over ten years ago), has been, in fact, slayed to ribbons. We never would have made decisions that are so blatantly not player focused.”
Gagnon now works at Champlain College’s game studio, and so explains that her privileged position in academia allows her to speak out about the game, where she closes with a message to Phoenix Labs and to the blockchain company that bought it out on the sly, emphasis hers: “DO BETTER WITH DAUNTLESS. Please, if not for us creators, FOR THE PLAYERS.”
