Dune: Awakening’s new trailer details how its map changes every week, which sounds awful for cartographers

I get that in-world the whole appeal of Dune’s Arrakis is all of that spice it harbours, but to be honest the giant sandworms are a bit of a dealbreaker for me. Even still, I have to admit that Dune: Awakening looks pretty neat even with that ever present threat, and a new trailer all about exploring the desert planet that dropped this week has helped pique my interest a little further. For starters, that desert bike looks pretty nifty, my time in Sable taught me that I love a good zoom through beautiful, sandy vistas, and this looks to be similar, even if Dune: Awakening’s world is a bit more hostile.

I’m glad that like many games before it, it’s copying Breath of the Wild’s climbing so you can scale pretty much any clifface. Once you’re up there you can do the video game staple that is scanning your environment to reveal the nearby area on your map, which will highlight shipwrecks or abandoned testing stations. You know, the Ubisoft effect. What actually makes that kind of interesting are the coriolis storms.

Most of the times storms in video games are just about blocking your vision, preventing you from going somewhere, maybe making it harder for you to be seen by enemies and vice versa, but Dune: Awakening’s coriolis storms change the entire map every single week. Being an online survival game, obviously this is something to keep players coming back so that it feels fresh week to week, but if Funcom can execute it well it could make for an interesting time, the headaches for cartographers aside.

If you’re eager to jump into the game, you can’t quite do that yet because it’s not out until May 20th. However! You can already make your character ahead of its release, so you’ve got plenty of time to make a cooler, more sci-fiy version of yourself, or some nightmarish creation you post on social media for 11 likes.