An early access version was published by Epic Games on May 21, 2019 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, including full support for cross-platform play, and was fully released for those platforms on September 26, 2019.

Dauntless takes place in a fantasy setting, where a cataclysmic event has torn the world apart, releasing monstrous creatures known as Behemoths that prey on the surviving humans.

[5] Houston credits Dark Souls specifically for helping to prove out that there is a market for "hardcore action games" focused on player versus environment encounters, which allowed them to take a safe risk on their approach to Dauntless.

[17] Houston, who had previously worked with Electronic Arts on Mass Effect 3, one of the first games that introduced loot boxes, said that they wanted to give players "a clearer relationship to the content that [they're] purchasing" in their decision to eliminate these.

[7] Houston said that his team was not worried about potential competition from Monster Hunter: World, which was announced to be coming in 2018 for personal computers and consoles during the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2017 in June 2017.

Houston said "The more AAA products that are coming into this genre, the wider it’s going to get", and believes that Dauntless differs itself by being tuned to a co-operative experience and using free-to-play mechanics.

[21] At The Game Awards 2018 in December 2018, Phoenix Labs affirmed that Dauntless would release for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in early 2019, and with future plans for a Nintendo Switch and mobile platforms.

This helped Phoenix to support cross-platform play through Epic Games' previous efforts to secure that for Fortnite Battle Royale.

[27][28] The game officially left early access on September 26, 2019 with its 1.0 launch and first major expansion "Aether Unbound",[29] with a total of 15 million players at that point.

Game Informer thought that the core monster hunting gameplay was focused and fun, but warned that advanced players would run out of new content fairly quickly.

[38] GameSpot was less enthusiastic, praising the weapon variety and monster design, but criticizing the bugs in the early version of the game and the setting, story, and characters being unfulfilling and not fleshed out.