If anyone was following this fiasco, they basically launched Dauntless on Steam with a major update that completely wrecked the game and removed much of its content. Dauntless was already struggling and went in weird directions during development but this was the final nail in the coffin, and the company seems to have totally gone under.
Source: https://reddit.com/r/dauntless/comments/1ibfvaq/studio_update/
It just got into the core fight, upgrade, fight loop way faster, without any of the tedious mechanics that I didn’t like from Monster Hunter, that I find boring. I played right around its launch on Epic, so who’s to say if we even played the same game, with the way these games can change over time?
I played it back when it was free before Monster Hunter Worlds came out, and it was great then!