In making a survival MMO, Funcom has welded two concepts together in a way we rarely see. We’ve survived on worlds with other people on them, but usually only in small numbers; rarely have we played with this many people on worlds this big. Similarly, while we’ve played large online worlds with many other people, rarely have they granted the kind of sandbox build-your-own-adventure freedom Dune: Awakening does. It feels quietly, profoundly, new.
But I was concerned before I played it. I’d watched videos from a handful of months ago and seen a game that looked stiff in action and lacking in visual impact – certainly compared to the spectacle of the recent Denis Villeneuve Dune films. An impossible bar, I know, but a comparison I’m sure I won’t be the only one making. I was unconvinced. But after spending a day playing it, my mind has changed.
The essence of Dune: Awakening – its Spice, perhaps – is found in the middle of what it does, not its constituent parts. It’s not in the survival side of the game or the massively multiplayer aspect of it, or even in the relatively cinematic third-person role-playing side of it either. It’s where all of these parts come together – in running across the open sand with a friend while knowing the colossal danger that burrows beneath, and sharing in that nervousness. It’s in establishing a sustainable existence in one of the most inhospitable environments possible. It’s driving friends around on desert bikes or flying them in an ornithopter. It’s teaming up for Destiny-like three-player dungeons or joining guilds to go to the Deep Desert and fight other guilds there. It’s swaying the Landsraad council to grant laws in favour of whatever storied faction you join – Harkonnen or Atreides. It’s all of that mushed together, and where it all meets.
It begins like a single-player role-playing game. I am a prisoner standing before a powerful and intimidating Bene Gesserit – a kind of magic user in the world – and I need to decide who I am. What do I look like (cue character creation), where was I born (a role-playing choice offering dialogue traits and emotes), and who was a mentor to me (a character archetype or class choice)? Then I’m forced forward by unseen magic onto my knees, to thrust my hand inside a box of truth and eventually pledge to perform a mission that will set me free: find the elusive Fremen hiding in the desert of Arrakis. The Dune music blares. It’s an atmospheric start.
The cinematic introduction continues as my craft is shot down flying too close to the planet’s surface, by a Fremen no less. They spare me, and we talk briefly before the Emperor’s elite Sardaukar soldiers fly down to attack. I’m saved, but now I’m alone in the desert, and this is where the tutorial begins. Here’s how to craft blades and bandages, the game tells me, here’s how to climb. Here’s my hydration meter – keep an eye on it – and here’s how you’ll get sunstroke if you’re not careful. Avoid it. Finally, combat, and how to strike, dodge, parry and shoot.
It’s a whistle-stop tour of systems that shows a game with some interesting ideas, and a pleasing amount of responsiveness. Having a dash-dodge on Alt as well as a parry, plus a mixture of attacks, makes combat feel active, and systems like free-climbing greatly open up the game’s sense of exploration. Crafting, too, is a doddle – easy to follow, quick to perform. It’s a confident start.
Now alone on the surface of Arrakis, the first phase of the game – the survival phase – properly begins. (Briefly, there are four phases roughly linked to an amount of time spent playing the game. The Survive phase is the first 10 hours; the Protect phase takes you up to around 30 hours; the Expand phase stretches to 100 hours; and the Control phase is everything after that.) It’s a familiar survival loop: make a basic suite of equipment and a place to call home. Gather easily available resources – here it’s scrap metal, plant fibres, rocks and ore – and turn them into weapons and armour and tools and so on. But it isn’t long before I notice a difference.
Time. It feels much quicker crafting and gathering in Dune: Awakening than in other survival games – perhaps because this is only one aspect of the game rather than the entirety of it. Whatever the reason, there’s a generosity in the amount of resources collected and in what’s required of you to craft things. What’s more, you only need one tool – your Cutter Ray – for every job (which also comes with a nice-enough gesture-matching mini-game when mining things), and you can magically pull building resources from nearby chests, which is a godsend. You can feel the months of closed beta streamlining and years of expertise from making Conan Exiles here. It’s a very smooth system, and it isn’t long before I have an early set of equipment and a base.
Building a base is, in particular, a breeze. You lay down a holographic blueprint of what you want to build, choosing building parts from a menu (you can have Atreides or Harkonnen pieces if you join their factions), and then hold a button to fill it in, (assuming you have the resources, which I’m pleased to say I always seemed to). You can even save the entire blueprint of your base to lay it down wholesale somewhere else, which is clever. In this way, you can up sticks and move to the other side of the desert no problem, or you can prepare disposable structures for the Deep Desert where guild warfare takes place – which is wiped clean by a Coriolis Storm each week.
Your hand is held quite firmly during these opening moments of the game. A journal system directs you step by step in what you need to do next, slowly unlocking the myriad features and systems in the game. Now you’ve got the capability to harvest enemy blood for water, for example; now you’ve got a Stillsuit as worn by Paul Atreides and the Fremen in the Dune films. It’s all nicely thematic and mechanically appropriate stuff – never do these items feel superfluous, and there’s always a proper use for them.
Soon, the game will push you away from your comfort zone and point you across the sandy sea, and here, of course, lurks a legendary problem: sandworms. Make too many vibrations on the surface and, like a shark smelling blood in the water, a sandworm will appear. What happens if they do? I decide to goad one and find out.
I run to the open sand and jump up and down until there’s an almighty roar and, nearby, a sandworm rears from the ground, casting around like an almighty periscope for the source of the disturbance. I am hardly hiding but back down it goes, confusingly, so I redouble my efforts until the telltale eruption reoccurs. This time it’s all business. Maw agape, the sandworm dives and surges towards me. I try to run – to use my magical sprint ability and escape – but it’s hopeless. It swallows me in an instant and I die.
I respawn feeling wonderfully naughty, only to realise the full consequences of actions: I have lost everything. Everything on my back and in my bag was swallowed by the sandworm and no longer exists, which in a game where stuff is everything – and where you spend a not insignificant amount of time making that stuff – losing it hurts. A lot. Sandworms gain an appropriately fearsome place in the threat-hierarchy of Dune: Awakening as a result, as well they should.
It takes underpants-Bertie about half-an-hour to re-equip, but that’s only because I have the machinery I need and because I’m using starter-level equipment. It’s not that hard to come by. It is a pain in the arse to do, though, and I can only imagine the frustration of losing later-game items made of hard-to-come-by materials. Sandworms are clearly not to be trifled with.
But it’s only material things I lose. This being a kind of role-playing game means there are character levels and skill trees and abilities to learn which you do not lose if you die, sandworm or otherwise. I chose the Bene Gesserit archetype, so the magical sprint I mentioned comes from that. It lets me dash like the Flash for a short distance, which is both useful and fun. I can also use the storied power of the Voice to compel enemies to run towards me and stand there dumbly, or have them take no notice of me as I wander past. Or if I’m feeling fighty, I can pump points into martial prowess and do things like instantly appear behind enemies for a backstab, wa-bam! There seems to be a pleasing amount of choice here, and I’m told we can respec freely and unlock almost all of it. The strategy comes from choosing which three abilities to actively use.
The other class archetypes are Trooper, Mentat, and Swordmaster, and they’re all designed in a way to bring something valuable to the rock, paper, scissors principle behind the game’s combat. Mentats help survey battlefields and locate what’s there; Bene Gesserits help control battlefields; and Troopers and Swordmasters are the ranged and close-up damage dealers. Broadly, there’s nuance within that. The governing idea is adaptability – there should never be only one approach to combat.
Enemies wearing energy shields, for example, will indefinitely block most fast-moving projectiles – shields don’t work here like they do in other games, draining and then recharging – so you’ll need to switch to a slow-moving melee weapon and get in close to penetrate the shield and take them down. You can do this alone with a varied loadout – multiple Funcom reps reiterate the game is viable as a solo experience – but the unspoken suggestion is it’s easier with friends.
As the day wears on, the rhythm of the early game in Dune: Awakening – and possibly the wider game – reveals itself. It’s a slow and steady affair, sparse by design, where occasionally you glimpse other players but are never crowded by them. This is because of the way the game’s servers work. It’s a bit confusing, but areas of the overall world are replicated across multiple servers – known as sietches – and these clusters of sietches make up the whole. For example, the sietch I’m in, in the Hagga Basin starting area, has a concurrent player limit of 40, and there are many of these sietches – as many as Funcom needs. Players can move around sietches fluidly; you can even control the movement to join sietches your friends are playing on. This is how each area of the game world works, though they vary in concurrent player size – the Deep Desert can support 36×36 guild warfare, for instance.
This enforced sparsity feels authentic to the atmosphere of Dune, and while there’s a lot of running around early on, it’s important for establishing the dangers of the land – the jeopardy of the sandworms, the debilitating effects of the sun, and the searchlights beaming from Emperor ships patrolling at night. Plus a lot of progression is based around improving your traversal speed. You’ll unlock grappling hooks that swing you high and Suspensor Belts that float you down again, and when you unlock vehicles, that revolutionises travel all over again. A Funcom rep spawns an ornithopter for me at the end of the day, because I am nowhere near achieving it myself, and it’s a marvel. It takes me out of reach of sandworms and makes me able to land atop rocky outcrops rather than climb them. It even serves as a mobile respawn location. These moments feel liberating because of all the dues paid earlier.
But before you get there, it’s important to feel the desert and what it’s like to live there. To run and hide from the great storms that occasionally blow through it. There’s an atmospheric moment in an NPC hub where an alarm sounds, signalling an oncoming storm, and then the slab-like doors slowly close to protect us against it. In moments like this, Dune: Awakening feels like the Denis Villeneuve films. In fact, the whole game experience reminds me more of the films than I was expecting. It’s no accident – Funcom has been working closely with Legendary Studios for years, sharing design work and assets; this is absolutely intended to be a film-like experience, though the story differs significantly, of course. There’s no Paul Atreides here; the timeline diverges before he’s born, speculating what would have happened if his mother gave birth to a daughter instead – a daughter trained as a Bene Gesserit who would predict the betrayal of Arrakis and save House Atreides.
There is a sense of a story running through the game, too. The backbone of it involves several Spice trials where you’ll huff a load of Spice to undertake – a bit like Paul does to have visions in the second film. I experience one of these and it takes me to an otherworldly place for some stealth platforming challenges, which are a nice break from the norm. Then I’m returned to the world with new Spice-related powers – an intriguing mechanic that deals with concepts of addiction, but which I haven’t seen enough of to really understand the long-term consequences of yet. Spice, then, features heavily in the game, both a thematic concept and a mechanical one.
Much about Dune: Awakening is interesting. It’s familiar yet not at the same time, and I like that. I cling to that difference as I begin to lose interest in combat encounters that lack much imagination or shape, and as I traipse across the sand for the umpteenth time to complete tasks which start to feel like chores. They’re just one part of a bigger whole, I tell myself.
How Dune: Awakening will come together many hours later, I don’t know yet. Likewise for how venturing to city hubs and joining guilds and factions will potentially change that experience further. But I like that there are already beefy later-game concepts there, and after several hours with the game, I’m confident enough to say it will be worth sticking around to find out – Funcom has decades of wisdom accrued in this area, don’t forget.
Or you can simply survive. You can live out your Dune fantasy in the most faithful recreation of Arrakis we’ve yet seen in a game, pausing as the ground shudders from a nearby sandworm, ducking for cover as a sandstorm blows in, and searching crevices for the secrets of the world hidden within. Dune: Awakening has promise – keep an eye on this one.
This article is based on a trip to a preview event in Norway. Travel and accommodation were paid for by Funcom.