When I first saw the dune demonstration, I was awakened over a year ago, and I was absolutely hyped to get it because I was skeptical that the survival game in the famous barren Arakis world can even work. Now, after enduring the unrelenting state and hostile lifeforms of desert planets for nearly 20 hours in a closed beta, I have confidence and have the basis of an absolute stellar MMO that uses one of the biggest sci-fi worlds ever created. Harvest raw materials from brutal wastelands, build bases, upgrade characters and loadouts, and endure all of that with the Raiders and rival homes, which is as good as I’d like to. That being said, I still feel like I’m only getting a small taste of the big game, as all the major social spaces, most of the PVP, especially the very important endgame area. It’s also no wonder Dune: Awakening was pulled back to a month while in beta. Still, I’m very impressed with most of what I’ve seen and more optimistic than ever that they might just pull this off.
If you just recently reverted spats to Shay Fuldo, Dune: Awakening is a massive multiplayer survival game from a team of developers who gave them a rather underrated Conan exile. The premise is simple. You must find yourself in Arachis and find a way to not die there. If you know a little about the setting, you need to understand the height of order. In the typical survival game fashion, start with little and do anything, turning rock and metal scraps harvested from the wild into tools to help survive, and building shelters to protect yourself from harsh environments. For thinking that he could jog around a large, uncharacterized desert (and frankly not to be blamed), Funcom actually did an incredible job of looting each area and filling up shipwrecks to blow away hidden caves and fortress. And while there are plenty of empty spaces where an inconspicuous pile of sand will just greet you, these spaces are used to make a great effect as obstacles to protect you from the next area.
For example, early on, you are limited to very small areas that are blocked from higher level areas, containing the materials needed to create better loot and better equipment. But crossing the massive distance of sand between you on foot is a death sentence. It will definitely attract the attention of angry worms in the process. To get to the other side, you will need to go through the first vehicle, the step of building a small bike, and race across the gap as quickly as possible. This clever use of free space will turn what I thought was a weakness in the setting into strength, and you can find a way to make some of your tail’s hot shy furdo actually make some of my favorite moments and cross the completely barren area.
Similarly, the repressive nature of the Sun changes the entire planet into a high stakes game of “floors are lava” by forcing darts from shaded areas to shaded areas, resulting in a slow mini-game from one place to another. By refusing to take the sun’s exposure seriously, it drains water more than ever, wipes off your health, and kills you in a rather short order. Certainly, when you hit your head and come back to find the shifted position of the sun and fry in the merciless heat, it can sometimes hurt a little, but that’s the price you pay for Arakis, my friends, my friends and I have made this little minigame more troublesome.
Of course, in addition to dodging sunlight across arid deserts, you will also fight against a band of bloodthirsty assailants and explore forgotten places with guns and swords. Third-person gunplay is still praised for being able to pull this slurred gunplay away from the back of the cover, throwing a hand-rena bullet, igniting a fair amount of leisurely encounters, and in MMOs with a ton of players on the servers, it is still admiring for being able to separate this sleazy gunplay. And there are plenty of skill trees to pick and build, like tricky, stealthy mentality and expert survivalist planetologists. As for myself, I focused most of my skill points on proven soldiers.
Running and firing with friends on your side is especially interesting, and I threw hand-drawn bullets to take them, like when my co-op partner used her bounty skills to force the enemy to go openly. Also, there was the smallest sampling of PVP in beta builds. This focused on several crash sites that allowed player-on-player violence, but it was difficult to get a sense of how this aspect shaking, as the server population is rather low in closed beta. In any case, the majority of the PVP hot zone is in the gaming endgame area where I was not allowed to proceed, so it seems like the full game will have to wait to get a good feel in PVP anyway.
As a longtime Dune fan, I feel it’s very good to explore and learn more about the world I really love. And even with considerable creative freedom by placing awakening within parallel reality and Canon than in books/films, Funcom has put a lot of effort into world building and lore. There are few details that have a major impact on gameplay. Very valuable water is treated as the ultimate resource. Blood from all fallen enemies, turn body fluids into water in stillsuits, and remove bases to plunder all of the liquid gold. Also, water is required to make advanced materials used to create higher-level equipment, so in addition to drinking it just to keep yourself alive, you need to harvest and stock up as much as possible. I won’t go into spoilers, but this kind of attention to detail touches on almost every aspect of the world, including the factions and characters you encounter along the way.
If you need to worry about a beta that’s otherwise thoroughly appealing, then that’s the fact that you’ve come across an entire mountain of bugs and performance issues that come with it, including everything from crashes to bursts, characters and objects to stretch out strangely. With the final version expected to debut soon, I was pretty relieved when I announced a month’s delay in the middle of the beta, perhaps to address these issues. As always, it’s hard to measure how much of a concern this is when beta is designed to help highlight and patch this kind of issue, but the number of issues that me and my friends encountered while playing were definitely the cause of the alarm on the start-up day.
