Dune: Awakening is threatening to turn me into a survival MMO guy after a lifetime as a devoted videogame hermit

GamesSurvival & CraftingDune AwakeningDune: Awakening is threatening to turn me into a survival MMO guy after a lifetime as a devoted videogame hermitWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Funcom)

A vast landscape with a crashed spaceship in Dune: Awakening.

Here is the precise point in my hands-off Summer Game Fest Dune: Awakening demo that I whispered a soft “Oh no” to myself. It was when our demo-er, in a spice-fueled fit of pique, butted up against the wall of a Harkonnen stronghold and immediately began climbing it, Breath-of-the-Wild-style (or Funcom-style, really, you could do much the same thing in Conan Exiles).

I was worried not because what I saw displeased me, but the opposite. It was precisely the kind of slightly janky systemic weirdness that I have a long track record of going utterly out of my gourd for, and what I’d seen of Dune: Awakening before our hero started clambering all over the joint had already sparked my curiosity. I was undergoing the precise same realisation that my colleaguesWes FenlonandChris Livingstonexperienced whentheysaw the game earlier this year.

(Image credit: Funcom)

A Harkonnen attack in Dune: Awakening.

I’ve never been a survival game or an MMO guy: Survival is hard enough in real life and friendships distract me from my engagements with esoteric politics and the original Xbox launch line-up, and yet Dune: Awakening had me wondering if maybe, just maybe, I was going to end up dropping a bunch of hours in the deserts of Arrakis.

Picking sides

The demo I saw was, more or less, a day in the life of a Harkonnen flunky in the 40-player Hagga Basin area. Dune: Awakening takes place in an alternate history where protagonist Paul Atreides was never born, his mother Jessica instead following the orders of her secretive Bene Gesserit masters to give birth to a daughter instead.

This means, somehow, that the Harkonnens don’t quite manage to pull off their decisive decapitating strike on the Atreides that they do in the films and books. Duke Leto is alive and very upset, and Arrakis is in the grip of a destructive War of Assassins. As a newborn Dune-head, it’s one of the most interesting parts of the game, opening up all sorts of cool opportunities for narrative experimentation in Herbert’s universe.

It’s also a lucrative opportunity for a blank-slate protagonist: The game will let you choose between the factions at war for Arrakis, building rep and accruing status with them as you go. Our demo-er had gone for the villainous, oleaginous Harkonnens over the less (outwardly) dastardly Atreides, and so we spent a fair amount of time hanging around the faction’s bulbous black architecture imported from its homeworld of Giedi Prime, picking up missions off the faction hub contract board and generally getting up to no good. Like climbing all over everything.

(Image credit: Funcom)

An ornithopter flies toward a tornado in Dune: Awakening.

We only spent a little time hanging out with the Harkonnens, though. Most of our time was spent ornithoptering our way around the game’s PvE survival areas, which isn’t too complicated to do. You’ll have to keep an eye on your engine temperature and health, but apart from that, getting around in the skies of Arrakis doesn’t look any more complicated than using a flying mount in WoW.

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Gathering dust

We were on the hunt, naturally, for resources. This is a survival game, after all, and Arrakis teems with useful bits and bobs to turn into gear and materials for your base. Actually gathering the stuff is a bit tricky, though: A key part of the UI is a noise meter, measuring just how much sound you’re making at any given time. An ornithopter, for instance, with its beating wings and noisy landings, generates a whole bunch of sonic pollution. That’s awkward, since the enormous, all-devouring worms that populate Arrakis are famously not keen on fuss, and drawing them to your location is a great recipe for getting eaten and losing all your hard-earned stuff.

Duke Leto is alive and very upset, and Arrakis is in the grip of a destructive War of Assassins

Alas, our demo-er was too adept at navigating the desert to attract the worms, so he was able to gather up what he was looking for (and I admit it, it had a very strange, Herbert-esque name I did not write down and have now forgotten) and go on his merry way.

(Image credit: Funcom)

The overland map in Dune: Awakening.

Parts like, for instance, plumbing the various wreckages that litter Arrakis' surface. That War of Assassins is making a right old mess, and the great hulking starship corpses it’s left all over the place are ripe for plundering. That means fighting your way through whoever you find there, including other players if you’re in the proper PvP zone.

Which, at least at this stage of development, looks charmingly odd, with the animations looking a little hitchy and staccato as our Harkonnen agent hero leapt about the wreckage of a crashed ship battling the villains within. I admit, I found it more charming than anything, but it was actually the activity of combat that caught my interest most. The presence of Dune shield tech makes the entire thing a process of navigating your own—and your enemies'—shield use: Keeping a beady eye on enemies to get hits in when they drop their defence, and deciding when to drop your own shield to get skills off.

(Image credit: Funcom)

Troops carry out an ambush in Dune: Awakening.

Our enemies dead, we opened our end-of-dungeon crate and were rewarded with some materials—Microflora Fiber—and a one-time-use rifle schematic, a bit of familiar MMO-ness in the Dune-iverse.

Desert power

(Image credit: Funcom)

A Harkonnen village in Dune: Awakening.

It sounds like a recipe for enjoyable, constantly shifting chaos, and it’s the part of the game I was most eager to see more of as I came out of the demo. Understandably, given that Dune: Awakening does not, as an unreleased game, currently have the hundreds of players necessary to populate its Deep Desert, my exposure to it came mostly in the form of some wandering around and a lot of verbal description from the Funcom team.

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Picking sides#

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Gathering dust#

Desert power#

Picking sides

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Gathering dust

Desert power