Well, now that the cat is out of the bag, let’s talk about Dune: Awakening.

I didn’t participate in the public beta, and the most exposure I had to the game prior to the head start was from watching folks on Twitch play for a bit (there were drops which I didn’t know or didn’t know I’d claim, so that was a happy accident). I knew a little about the game and it’s approaches from a few of the showcase videos that were published in the run-up, so the only thing I was missing was the particulars of putting hands-on.

A few spoilers going forward, but nothing monumental.

Where does this fit into Dune canon?

It’s kind of difficult to release a game with common game tropes and also set in a known universe where there’s already a central figure. We can’t all be the Kwisatz Haderach, of course. Instead, Dune: Awakening has chosen the alternate reality approach by setting the game in a timeline where Paul Atreides was never born. Instead, the Atreides had a daughter, Lady Jessica was elevated within the Bene Gesserit, and as a result was able to prevent the assassination of Duke Leto. Because the Emperor’s plot failed, all hell broke loose on Arrakis. The fremen were wiped out in a planetary pogrom and both Harrkonin and Atreides now have a presence on the planet. That more or less brings us to where we’re at when the game starts.

This isn’t terribly un-canon because in the book as well as in some/most/many/all of the live action treatments, Paul can see alternate outcomes of different timelines. We just happen to inhabit one of those timelines.

Who are we?

Instead of the Lisan-al Gaib, we’re a prisoner, sent to Arrakis by the Bene Gesserit to do some covert work. On our way there, however, the prison transport is “unflown” by a mysterious desert person with a shoulder mounted rocket. This mysterious soul drags us from the wreckage and admits to being a not-fremen, but that’s about all he’ll say. Instead, he puts us on a tutorial path to surviving the desert.

Gameplay

Dune: Awakening is a survivalbox in every way, with a few bespoke mechanics that fit into the milieu. My first unlocks were for things like a basic and janky knife, a material scanner/harvester, and a set of armor.

Resource gathering

The scanner can be used to both scan larger resource nodes (sandstone, copper, scrap metal) and to carve it up. Once scanned, a resource pile will provide a seam to trace with the other mode of the scanner, and once that is done, the pile explodes into a large amount of resource. There are also loose resources on the ground for immediate pickup. The good news is that in the starting area of the Hagga Basin, these are pretty plentiful; the better news is that these resources respawn in the same place, and rather quickly.

One important resource is water, which [spoiler alert] is hard to come by on Arrakis. The first way to get a drink is to suck the dew from desert plants. The next is to craft a stillsuit which collects cast-off water while “doing stuff” like running in the open desert or during combat. Later water containers can be crafted that can collect liquid from water dispensers in certain areas, from harvested dew-bearing plants with a special tool, or filled from machines in our homes which convert NPC blood to water.

Combat

There are no random mobs in the desert — aside from the sandworms, of course. Instead, bandits are holed up in small caverns sprinkled throughout the rocky outcroppings. Small camps are usually on cliffs with easy access and campfires that make them easy to find. Others are located inside caverns closed up by “micro-sandwich sheets” which trap moisture inside. These are accessed by ripping the sheet with a knife, which also provides a resource to have. Then it’s cleanup time.

Of course, there are at least (as far as I have made it) two types of enemies. The first is a rank-and-file thug who is using either a ranged weapon or attacks with a knife. These can be taken out fairly easily, although the stagger mechanism can be kind of brutal, as it’s difficult to recover from. I prefer to hit from a distance, either with a pistol or rifle. The second type of enemy are the ones who have the Holtzman shields. These bastards can take several hits from a firearm and stay standing. The best way is, of course, to get in close and use the slow attack with the knife to penetrate the shield. Firearms can blast through, but doing so uses up a lot of ammo.

Dangers of the desert

When in the shadows of rocky outcroppings or at night, heat isn’t an issue. When in the full daylight, however, heat becomes a problem. There’s a meter which tracks how “exposed” a player is and when that fills, dehydration accelerates.

There are a few levels of hydration. The first can be accomplished in the wild by licking the dew from certain plants. To reach the subsequent levels, water needs to be used, and exceeding the “plant licker” stage confers benefits beyond simply “not dying of dehydration” (though I forget what those benefits are). Most of the immediate gameplay offers just the dew, and it wasn’t until I was a few levels in that I was able to craft a litrejon which is like a Thermos that carries water. Water can be made by using a blood extractor on defeated enemies, and then running it through a processor. This sits in my house, so I have to keep killing, filling, refining, and dining to keep my hydration levels up.

Homesteading

Sandstorms are a regular occurrence. These are brutal, and can cause injury and death — I have died to sandstorms and they are no joke. To keep safe, finding shelter is important; if shelter can’t be found, shelter can be built. This starts by unlocking the sub-fief console and building one to claim some space on or around the outcroppings of the desert.

Most building blocks are unlocked early on, so it’s not a chore to get access, nor is it terrible to unlock additional blocks. A building tool is used once to place blueprints; using the tool on a blueprint section again will apply proper materials — if available — to finalize that piece.

Bases need to be powered (generators, fueled by fuel cells we find in the desert). This gives energy to other machines, and also provides a shield around the building to protect it from sandstorms. There are also processors for ore, for making chemicals like engine fuel, the aforementioned blood purifier, and a fabricator which his used to create usable items like weapons, armor, and stillsuits.

The good thing about Dune: Awakening’s base system is that everything has a permission. Access can be controlled at the door, or through the sub-fief console. Individual machines can be set as well. Access levels range from “just me” to “me and friends”, “guild members”, and even “public”.

Getting around

Sadly, I didn’t get my first vehicle until a few levels in. Vehicles are precious affairs because they need to be constructed from various individual parts, they can break down, and they can disintegrate. The first unlocked vehicle is the tracked trike, and to build one of these I needed a chassis, an engine, three tracks, a body-cover, and a gas-tank, I think. I added an optional fanny-pack so I could keep an “emergency kit” on hand. Vehicles can be damaged on a per-component basis, and can be repaired in kind. As parts get damaged, they start to lose their durability, allowing repairs to happen only for so long before they break completely. That’s why I’m carrying an extra tread, engine, blowtorch and blowtorch wire for repairs, and a medium fuel cell. The worst place for a transport to die is when crossing the open desert.

There are other vehicles that we can make, like a larger transport, an ornithopter, and probably Spice harvesting vehicles, but I’m nowhere near those yet.

Sandworms

Sandworms are prevalent and potentially terrifying. They are shown on the map, at least in a general sense. Moving across the open desert will pop up a waveform that shows how close a worm is to our location; the more spastic the waveform, the closer the worm is. Simply running across the sand will transmit vibrations to nearby worms — as do things like activing shields or suspensors that help reach ledges or slow our falls. In later areas of the Basin, there is “drum sand” which is an area where footfalls are amplified and can result in a speedy call-to-arms for the sandworms.

I have yet to get eaten by a worm, but as soon as I see the waveform freaking out, I start to freak out.

Classes

Classes are…not exactly classes, as I think they can be changed by speaking to the right NPC, and they don’t fall into exclusive Trinity classes. I went with the Bene Gesserit “class” in order to use The Voice; at its inception, it draws NPCs to me and stuns them for a time, making them very easy to stab. Other skills increase healing for myself, allow me to become relatively invisible for a short time, or move very, very fast, as well as offering both active and passive selections.

Other paths include planetologist, trooper, mentats, and a few others I forget. After talking with the proper NPC, we might be able to start putting points in other paths, but I have yet to look into that as I’m comfortable with my initial selection.

Loose ends

I haven’t yet thrown in with one of the Houses represented on Arrakis, so I don’t know anything about that, although I’m at the point where I could join up.

There are missions beyond the guided tutorial missions. These can be had at the outposts present in each desert zone through a kind of message board. Missions so far have included fetch quests, area clear-out quests, delivery, and crafting quests.

There are a few “delve”-like areas. These involve getting into a building, crashed ship, or underground arboretum and either completing objectives taken from the message board or offered through the tutorial, killing NPCs, or finding specific items. These areas tend to have closed off internal areas that can only be accessed after finding the correctly colored key. These areas are great for loot, and I think there are some crafting components that can only be found in these kinds of locations.

There is Spice that can be harvested in the PvE zones. Because research is gated by “intel points” that we need to spend to unlock things, being able to craft whatever is necessary to find and harvest the Spice isn’t something that happens quickly, or within the first PvE zone (Hagga Basin South). I’m not sure where the above Spice blow happened except that it did; maybe someone from a higher zone backtracked to go after the smaller patches. I don’t really know.

PvX

I know there’s concern about how PvE this game is. The answer is “pretty damn PvE”, at least insofar as I’ve seen, and I’ve played for a total of about 8 hours. I know that’s not much, especially considering I screw around a lot, but the Hagga Basin is larger than it looks on paper (there are 12 sub-zones), resources respawn quickly, and bandit camps respawn on the regular as well. I left Hagga Basin South for the next Basin zone (Western Vermillius Gap), and I haven’t even completed all of the POIs in the Basin South. I have seen other players, and everyone’s been pretty civil, though everyone locks their doors to prevent theft. There’s a lot that can be done in the PvE zones, I’m thinking, although I’m sure that at some point, it’ll either be “hang around the PvE areas doing the same loops” or “stick my head into the Deep Desert to see what’s what”. How soon that will happen remains to be seen, but it doesn’t feel like it’s going to happen any time soon. I am happy with the PvE options in the game thus far.

Is this an MMO?

The server structure is kind of weird, or I feel that it’s weird because of how it’s been organized.

We first choose a “world”, which I am thinking of as like a data center. Then, we choose a server or “sietch” within that world. The sietch is our home server, and we can travel to any other sietch within our world, but we have to do this when we log in, and once we’re in someone else’s server we can’t build there. This means that if you are at least in a world with your friends, you can still meet up if you can agree who’s home server you play on for that session.

There are other people running around, that’s for sure. Everyone can be inspected and invited to party. I believe that any tutorial mission or contracts we have can be shared with party members, as I’ve seen steps in both which indicate that they can be completed by other team members. I’m sure that by the time I finish writing this the most players will be at the higher tiers, with player counts diminishing as we regress back towards the initial starting zone. However, since this was during the headstart, once the game officially opens this week I’m sure there will be a lot more players in the starting zones.

I think the conceptual issue with Dune: Awakening is that every sietch’s Hagga Basin is unique to that server and is made up of several instances, each with a cap of about 40-50 players. This is hardly going to put the second “M” in “MMO”, but the common areas like Arrakeen or Harko Village are cross-server populated, and their instances can accept up to 100-200 players per instance. The Deep Desert is massive, and can take up to 500-900 players. The Deep Desert sounds like it will also be instanced, but the instances are accessible from all servers within the same world. So in that light I think the way things are crossing one another, split between worlds and servers, and with instancing on top, makes the “MMO” moniker difficult to pin because nowhere outside of the Deep Desert — and even then, only just — do we see a large number of other players. They’re there, just in other instances. I guess that doesn’t answer the question, but real question is whether or not you consider an MMO “people I can see” or “people I have access to”, If it’s the former, then Dune: Awakening won’t cut your specific brand of mustard. If it’s the latter, then people seem to be accessible either through your Steam-sync’d friends list or because you’ve made some in-game associates being in the same place at the same time.

Overall thoughts

I was cool on the game for a while in part because of the Funcom angle, but also because we’re in the era of the “nu-PvP mindset” where it seems that every online multiplayer game is PvP-first. I need to get better at bookmarking these things, but I know I heard someone at Funcom quoted as saying that if PvE players didn’t want to PvE, they could “hang around the social hubs” which sounds pretty dismissive and infantilizing on it’s face. Now that I have experienced what Dune: Awakening has to offer (at least during it’s initial stages), the PvE areas look to be pretty expansive, and while the Deep Desert is larger, land-mass-wise, and can hold more people per pixel, only incorrect apples-to-oranges metrics can say that “there’s no PvE” in Dune: Awakening.

Hagga Basin South, the starting part of the Basin, is pretty easy going. Resources are plentiful and the enemies are not very tough when managed correctly. The next area in the Basin, the Western Vermillius Gap, is a lot more difficult as dew-providing flowers are harder to find and NPCs start showing up with shields. The good news is that once I reached this area all of my blueprints became available to purchase once I get the points to do so, giving me access to better gear and homesteading equipment. My biggest problem right now is just staying hydrated so I can feel that I can move around WVG without dying of thirst.

Everything else aside, I’m really enjoying Dune: Awakening, although the sudden nail-biting survival has become my overriding concern. I feel like I am spending more time tacking down means of hydration than I am focusing on story or side-missions, and that’s wearing me a bit thin at this point. My loop has been to log in, hydrate, do one or two small open-world bandit camps mainly for the blood, process it, drink again, then log out. Anything more than that is stressing me out because of the shortage of water.

Still, the gameplay is solid, the features are varied enough to be interesting, and while the survival aspect is often enough to base a game on, laying a story and side-missions on top provides a whole lot of things to do on a minute-by-minute basis. And as much as I dislike Funcom, I will say that the stories and talent that went into The Secret World rarely disappointed; so far I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the voiced actors, and their stories in Dune: Awakening.

If you’re planning on picking up Dune: Awakening and are looking for a home, I’m on World Scorpius, Sietch Nadir. There’s nothing special about that one; I didn’t know where anyone else I knew would be rolling, or if they were playing during head-start ore retail, so I picked what sounded like a good, not too overcrowded combo.