Perilous are your first and millionth steps on the sands of Dune: Awakening, an unashamedly harsh game that throws you deep within the desert, along with nothing but a crafting kit and a vague mission: Find the Fremen, wake the Sleeper. What starts as a lonesome journey of scavenging scrap metal and sucking dew from planets gradually morphs into server-wide clashes over spice and fortune. It’s a survival game experience unlike any other I’ve played.
The reason why is clear. Dune: Awakening isn’t one game but three, a psychedelic melting of genres. At first a full-fat survival game, thirty hours later it becomes an RPG rich with lore and political intrigue. Another thirty, and you’re in a Discord call collaborating with guilds on how best to fend off the Atreides and win the weekly Landsraad. Only now, having played through everything available, do I see the full picture.
Regardless of your progress, foundational survival gameplay is the connecting tissue that makes the whole thing work. Initially a standard offering, the process of gathering material around the starter area of Hagga Basin, refining your haul at your handcrafted base, and manufacturing new gear is made endlessly compelling with an unwavering faithfulness to the source material. The folks at Funcom are clearly freaks for Dune.
With wormaholics in charge, you quickly find that Dune isn’t just a coat of paint in Awakening, but a lattice tower the experience is built around. You need water, right? It’s a scarcity on Arrakis. You can harvest water from small plants with specialized tools, sure. But you can also build blood extractors that’ll pull fluids from the dead. Later on, hauling whole corpses back to base and dropping them in a Deathstill makes every battle a bounty.
Those who’ve watched the films will remember that actors perform something similar on the silver screen, but the Deathstill is taken straight from the books. Loading screens, likewise, are peppered with quotes from the novels, and while concepts may be expanded on for gameplay purposes, it’s all rooted in Frank Herbert’s work as if he penned the bible. I suppose for Dune fanatics, he may as well have.
I must emphasise this fealty is spread all over the game. The worms come in two varieties, tri-mouthed worms which are a common threat during the early game, and gigantic round-mouthed worms of the Deep Desert. They look fantastic, almost slithering from the pages. An awe-inspiring combination of booming audio design as they erupt from the ground, and staunch loyalty to Herbert’s works through meticulous modeling. The result: a terrifying presence that haunts the game, equally daunting to fresh-faced and battle-hardened players alike.
NPCs from different factions likewise speak, look, and act the part. Capital cities for each faction – Atreides and Harkonnen – feel as if snatched directly from the paperback. Take Maxim Kazmir, your first taste of Harkonnen slime. He’s a cheeky chap, with a snake’s tongue that slings venom at his Atreides counterpart just a few feet away from him. He’s not an outlier either; most characters have a sense of wit about them. Maxim in particular is unashamedly self-interested, betrayed by his own aspirations and lust for drugs. Not only is he entertaining all on his lonesome, Maxim acts as a great tone-setter to the legion of backstabbers that make up the Harkonnen.
His characterisation, alongside his peers in the Harkonnen, rolls out the tonal carpet for Harko Village. This faction-hub is a daunting black stonescape home to sketchy back alleys and slave cages, cementing a sense that you’ve stepped into the Bad Guy Zone, the cruelty condo, home to all things nefarious. It does, however, also have the best bar, and a lady who calls you kitten on the regular. Something to think about.
Aside from the typical loop of gathering and building, each zone is peppered with contracts that push you towards points of interest, like grand pillars with tips that touch the clouds. Or Eco Labs, the game’s spin on the traditional RPG dungeon that offers both a reprise from endless rock and sand as well as vehicle materials. Contracts also introduce various factions of goons that pollute the landscape. These, your starter course in the rich lore that bubbles up from the world of Dune, are intriguing enough. But for those who aren’t there for the narrative threads that tie each region together they also teach you the ropes.
Hey, there’s a chest I need you to check out, go climb up this massive mountain to find it – the importance of suspensor belts is emphasised here. While climbing, snipers with poisoned rifles take potshots at you – hey buddy, turn your shield on. Dune: Awakening takes a subtle approach to onboarding that gives you the tools and trusts you to figure out how to use ’em.
The result is a survival experience that floats rather than drags. It’s got a wonderful difficulty curve that starts off easy, but quickly ramps up with tougher enemies and locations that are harder to navigate. The moment you leave the tutorial zone your thrust headfirst into tanky heavy gunners that tear through your health bar, as well as shielded enemies. Here you learn the importance of a shield – and of kiting a shielding foe away from his mates, so you can slowly skewer him. It’s a sudden but a firm wake-up call, a reminder that there’s more to fear than worms.
Or later still as you venture West things really get spicy. Regular riflemen are swapped to those with poisonous shots, and a dedicated ability to shoot out a cloud of poison. Here, a good forty hours in, the lessons keep coming: You’ve gotta move! You must prioritise enemies that threaten you most. Real on-the-spot decision making, forced upon you in every engagement. It’s teaching-players-the-intricacies done right, and exploration is made all the more exhilarating for it.
You’re not gated off from tougher zones, but foes there are tough to take down without adequate equipment. The result is something not linear, but still structured. Open, but guided. This, smartly, also allows Dune: Awakening to kick your teeth in on the regular, which may frustrate some, sure, but putting aside my desire to tell folks to toughen up – this is Arrakis! – I’ll note that massive losses are never unfairly sprung on you. You can always go out and reclaim lost gear, unless you are eaten by a worm.
Those worms, in all their big, phallic majesty, are clearly indicated when on your tail as you hang around on open sand. Without such risks, the rewards are less sweet. Open sand holds hidden treasure, valuable resources, and spice. Weighing up how long to stay in the reach of Mr Wiggles is the kind of decision that lies at the heart of every survival game. While arguably harsh, it’s this kind of thing that instils a sense of dread in players – a tendency to caution that’ll be dead handy when you start venturing out into end game activities. In short, big up the worm. He can keep my bike.
The only component of Dune: Awakening I’m not quite so sold on is the combat. The slow blade penetrates the shield, as per the novels and films, but as such hand-to-hand clashes can feel sluggish at times. The only way to take down a shield is to overload it with a deluge of regular projectiles or specialized guns that neutralise them, or through a slow, piercing blow in melee.
The latter is the norm, and as such melee combat can devolve into either a flurry of spammed light attacks, so as to trigger a stagger state where slow stabs are guaranteed; or the parry waiting game, where you sit back and wait for an enemy to attack first before reflecting the blow, causing a stagger, and once again a slow stab.
The result of all this is a crushing halt to momentum, which may work well enough in one-on-one fights but rip the soul from clashes against larger groups. Ranged combat too suffers from the deep roots in source material. Your shield can’t be active while you shoot, you see. So ranged enemies often don’t have shields at all. As such, you just shoot ’em a few times and they drop as fast as pandemic hobbies.
There are technically alternative solutions, in weapons that offer avenues for bypassing shields – be it through overwhelming firepower or special twists on how projectiles interact with them – but the vast majority of your time fighting will be within these bothersome boundaries. It’s the only part where a sturdy attachment to the source material led to a soured gameplay experience. I imagine the developers at Funcom found themselves in a bit of a bind, unable to break away from the tenets of Dune action to create a more fluid fighting system.
(I do think shields create an interesting dynamic when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, mind, especially in PvP. Baiting out slow strikes, whittling down stamina, and cashing out damage in devastating slow stabs and slices can be compelling. But as far as PvE goes, it gets repetitive fast.)
At around the forty hour mark you build your first ornithopter, and are thrust out beyond Hagga Basin into the wider world. Here, all this way into the game, is where the story takes the stage – and I’ve got to say, it became a surprising treat for me. Suddenly Dune: Awakening shifts from a pure survival game to an RPG, more similar to another MMO in Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Now, the background choices you made in character selection become more important, as what planet you come from, say, or your given class, can lead to unique dialogue. Snobby Harkonnen may look down upon your Pyon heritage, or they may note how Harkonnen society’s emphasis on ascending the ranks offers ripe opportunities for one such as you.
Cutscenes become more prevalent too! There’s this fifty-ish hour chasm between the opening minutes of Dune: Awakening and the real meat of the story, where your only taste of cinematic storytelling come from brief huffs of spice in desolate places, something that gets tiring fast, save for those who savour a night out in Port Talbot. Suddenly it’s wham! New characters, new places, twists and turns, action and intrigue.
All the while, your own character learns more about their mission and the big players on Arrakis, and meets a cast of well-performed characters. There are men and women behind the curtain and they have plans for the world, plans within plans for those who call it home. I shan’t spoil any of the big twists, obviously. But I will say that for those of you familiar only with the recent films, the game explores topics not present there. Funcom also decided to make Feyd Rautha sexy. Which I mean, hey, one more reason to join team Harkonnen.
Taking an alternate universe approach to the setting of Dune, meanwhile, has paid off in interesting ways. It goes to different locations, while places you know are drastically changed. Characters are introduced as foe when you know them as a friend, and Funcom has opened a door to mysteries untouched by the media most will have already experienced.
Dune: Awakening has an audience of day-one lore hounds, and if the game followed the canon by the letter the narrative risks falling into the background: been here, done that. When everyone knows Paul Atreides and the naughty things he gets up to, be that in the books or recent blockbusters, it’s hard to offer genuinely shocking twists. It’s through this alternate approach, Dune: Awakening snatches your curiosity. Of all the future updates I’m excited for, further additions to the story rank high up on my list.
After all of that is concluded, you’re left with the end game. Funcom has tried, through interviews and community-facing dev vlogs, to shed the MMO tag the game has gained. I do understand why. Direct player interactions are few and far between, limited only to the steady gentrification of Hagga Basin as a thousand stoners build cubes across the surface. However after roughly 80 hours you leave the sandy new build estates and enter the Deep Desert.
I love the Deep Desert. It’s a gigantic map of mostly empty, sandy expanse, save for a scattering of outcrops where high end materials, PvE encounters, and political capture points can be found (but more on that in a little bit). Here, it’s full on PvP baby. Maximum loot, maximum danger. A flock of eight bozos in attack ornithopters can rush you down and steal your hard-earned ore, and they may call you mean names on voice comms while they do so.
I appreciate this style of PvP is polarizing. It can be rough when you lose stuff in what feels like an unfair fight. But, this fierce environment encourages joining a guild, which in turn thrusts players into the weekly political boxing match that I’ve found endlessly captivating.
You see every week, there’s the Landsraad, where a five-by-five grid of galactic houses have a different request each time, and it’s your job as a member of house Harkonnen or Atreides to win them over. You can do these by achieving certain tasks, handing in a specific resource or killing a certain number of bandits. Alternatively, there’s a house-specific capture point in the Deep Desert that constantly accrues favour while under the control of a faction. Winning the Landsraad is important as it offers special bonuses for the following week. On my server, we recently won the right to a special shop with powerful guns and melee weapons for sale. We can now take these and leap into PvP this week with increased vigour.
This here is the MMO portion of Dune: Awakening, and it’s a scorcher. It feels less like structured group activities you’d see in a traditional MMORPG raid, and more like grouping up in Classic WoW for a world boss. Or joining a mount farm train in Final Fantasy 14. It’s organic community play, something that forms bonds, strong friendships, and undoubtedly tense rivalries.
It’s because of this, I suspect, that Dune: Awakening’s in-game playerbase has proven so social, so helpful, and so jovial. People will fly up to your house and compliment you, or try to recruit you as to welcome you into their vast guild base. People frequently use global chat, narrating whatever’s going on at any one time. They may even complain passionately about a player called Jesus, who is leading a pack of a half-dozen ornithopters in a mass ganking effort. (That’s not something I made up – I believe as of writing Jesus is still at large.)
This here is the gluetrap that’ll keep folks playing Dune: Awakening for a while. Many I’m sure will end their journey in Hagga Basin, build a big base that looks like a penis (where would Funcom be without those?) and log out forever. Those who remain, who envelop themselves in the end game, will find themselves snared as I have, join a guild, and become genuinely invested in politics of their own slice of Arrakis. Funcom, creators of MMOs like Anarchy Online and Secret World, may have stepped away from a pure MMO setup with Dune: Awakening, but the developer’s expertise has borne fruit here.
Dune: Awakening is a case study in how to adapt a beloved body of work right. It’s three wonderful games married into a frankly exceptional send-up to one of sci-fi’s greatest written works, obviously crafted by hopeless romantics enamoured with Dune. Superb survival gameplay, a bold narrative, and the social playground of its PvP end game work wonders in unison, and form a game most will get a kick out of. Perhaps more importantly, at a time when triple-A game development tends to play it safe, I’m sure there was real pressure to sand down some of Dune: Awakening’s many quirks. I’m very glad that didn’t happen.
A copy of Dune was provided by the publisher.
