Dune Awakening is out at last, and it’s a strange, wonderful blend of an MMORPG and an open world survival game. This melding of genres results in a game of two halves, weaved together with a rich and deep care for the source material. Funcom, somehow, has managed to juggle these components expertly. The result? A game unlike any I’ve really played before.
The game itself is massive. Already I’ve sunk 30+ hours into it and still find myself with plenty to explore, heaps to build and the fog of war covering portions of the map. In that time I’ve explored the majority of the main map: Hagga Basin. I’ve narrowly avoided getting vored by a worm, and I’ve experienced something I only thought 40-year-old home owners get to experience: house envy.
The soul of survival in Dune Awakening is an ever-present core of every play session you’ll have with the game. When you start, you’re building scrap metal knives and plant fibre rags, but soon enough you’ll find yourself constructing more elaborate, more expensive goodies. The survival cycle is thus: build a base, gather materials, construct new gear.
You repeat that until you’ve finished crafting everything you want from the tier of materials available, at which point you hop on a bike or buggy and drive into the perilous unknown in order to do it all over again. It’s a moreish process that even 30 hours in I’ve not gotten tired of yet.
There’s something about cutting an ore node apart with a laser that feels and sounds fantastic, something about the audio visual feast you get when floating down from great heights. Dune Awakening’s survival gameplay may follow a traditional cycle, but its repackaged in such fine wrapping paper it’s hard to get bored of.
As for the world itself, it’s rich in lore, secret hideaways, and well, sand. It doesn’t matter what shade the grain is, nor how rocky one zone is compared to another, the vast majority of Dune Awakening that I’ve seen so far is a sun-seared brown. Obviously right, it’s Dune. But it’s worth noting for those who quickly tire of a lack of visual variety.
Those with a greater tolerance for such matters will find the initially minute differences between zones forces you to adapt the way you play. Zones I’ve entered appear to get progressively hotter, which means water management is more important, which means you may struggle to roam thirsty and carefree.
Bizarrely, the worms themselves take a back seat around the 15-hour mark, replaced instead with grand vertical spires of stone, covered with snipers, heavy gunners, and buffer enemies. Here you must learn to make use of your suspensor belt, practice good stamina management, and prepare for battles against four or five shielded foes at once. I found myself pleasantly challenged by the steady difficulty curve present here.
One worry I did have previewing the game prior to its launch was how easy and repetitive melee combat can be. Enemies weren’t dodging out of combos, and you could rinse and repeat slow stabs to make short work of even the henchest shielded foe. This has been addressed! Enemies do actually hold their own now, and if you find yourself overwhelmed, dying is not a rare occurrence.
When you do die, you drop a portion of your materials and all your equipment suffers damage. You’ll then have to trek back to collect your lost goods, which thanks to a handy checkpoint system and craftable respawn beacons isn’t frustrating at all. The exception is the worms. If you get eaten, all your gear is gone. Permanently.
This may sound like a nightmare, and I’ll confess the one time I got all my steel gear and mark 2 bike eaten I was exceptionally tilted, but it ultimately adds to the experience. If the worms were a joke, the majority of the survival portion wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable.
That’s the trick, you see. The trick to making both a great survival game and a faithful send-up to the Dune universe. Make it hard. Not unfair, not cheap, but difficult in meaningful ways. Funcom, by bringing in elements of the sci-fi classic and implementing them into a survival game structure, has created an endearing base from which it can build an MMO upon. A sturdy survival game which hundreds of hours can be perched atop.
As the survival elements start to become a laborious process of rushing back and forth between the nearest ironworks, or mineral extraction facility, the MMO portion starts to kick in. More often than not you’ll see an Orniphopter flying overhead, and driving through a region will present you with plenty of houses of other players.
As such the harsh desert of Arrakis quickly feels more like a suburb of stone shacks and more elaborate houses for the creatively inclined. Here I discovered a feeling I didn’t think I’d experience until I owned a real home of my own.
There is a player on my server, a short hop away from my front door, with a beautiful house. We both snatched up great real estate near Pinnacle Station and set up shop, except while I busied myself with contracts peppered across the map they seemingly busted out the CAD software and sketching paper, and built a mansion. Peering through their windows, I see they’ve put down a carpet, and a portrait on the wall.
I hate them, for two good reasons. One, they have a nicer house and vehicle than me. I see them flying from their roof in their ornithopter while I slide down a makeshift ramp in my basic buggy. Second, they’re Atreides.
Early on in Dune Awakening you’re introduced to the two great houses, but your engagement with the politics of the situation remains almost entirely a PvE matter. Around the 30 hour mark things start to get a touch more player focused. Players with disposable income buy customisation for their clothes and bikes, so you can see which faction someone aligns with. They can also engage in the Landsraad system.
I haven’t interacted with the Landsraad yet, I am guildless and poor, but already it has interacted with me. By forming guilds and aligning with a faction, players can fight over the vote of smaller houses dotted around Dune Awakening. Put simply, if a faction has more votes than another, they get to vote on a powerful faction-wide boon for the next real world week. The Atredies won the first week, somehow.
On my server, the Atredies chose to gain access to a special vehicle shop that only they can browse and buy from. You see how the tensions between players naturally fosters in Dune Awakening? Not only does my neighbour have a nicer house and car than me, he also shops in the nicer part of town? Maybe next week I’ll work to win the Landsraad, and maybe I’ll build a flamethrower to help me do it.
While I’ve not yet reached the “end game” and all it entails, Dune Awakening has this beautiful gradual shift from a pure survival experience to a more MMO-centric one. It shifts slowly in the background, in a fluid manner that quietly encourages everyone (even those who may just be around to craft a cool car and drive it around) to take up arms against their fellow player, literally or through other endeavors.
It’s a tantalizing all out war of blades, guns, and minds built upon a wonderful survival game foundation that is well worth playing. So tantalizing in fact that it was hard to pull myself away from the game to write about it. You can thank a server maintenance window (coinciding with the weekly reset) for this set of thoughts existing.
It’s too early for a full review, but as of right now I see little reason not to recommend giving Dune Awakening’s unique offering a chance.
