3 years 11 months ago
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I was a total rookie in the monster-slaying, co-op action RPG Dauntless when the developer guiding me through a preview of the upcoming Call of the Void update told me we were about to jump into some “mid- to late-game content.” That felt a bit like being woken up on a Saturday morning and hearing there’s a bear outside and I need to deal with it. But decked out with an absurdly oversized hammer and some stylish plague doctor armor, there wasn’t much to do but take a deep breath and plunge into the unknown.
A typical hunt in Dauntless usually focuses on a single boss (called a behemoth) at a time. But Escalation missions, like the new Call of the Void we were about to take on, feature a gauntlet of multiple fights in a row. And each fight can feature a randomized pairing of two different bosses that may play off of each other in ways the developers never even considered. We were unlucky enough to come up against a Shrike and a Skraev in the same room – two great-tasting, winged death beasts that taste great together. I was told certain combinations have proven, through testing, to be so absurd that they had to be banned from appearing together.