Over the weekend, I finally got a chance to play the beta version of Dune: Awakening, which I’ve been following since the initial announcement. The game will be fully released in a month, but I think it will realistically differ from the beta only in scale and expansion of those mechanics that were unavailable, so I can describe with a clear conscience what you’ll be doing in the game, what it’s like and how it plays.
Upon watching the announcement, my first thought was “This is Conan Exiles, but set in Arrakis!”, and in principle, this is a correct line of thought.
The basic core of survival MMO gameplay (a genre that both Conan and Dune identify themselves with) got carried over from Conan, while everything else was finalized and changed to suit the setting and feedback from players. Dune: Awakening has a much larger story component now, it has become more accessible to beginners and overall feels better than its predecessor. The game starts with a dialogue between the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother and our hero, during which we create a character and receive a clear order – to go to Arrakis, find the missing Fremen and awaken a certain Sleeper. Character creation has not changed much since the time of Conan, but has acquired a large amount of customization.
The player will also be asked to choose an origin and a starting class, which determine your abilities at the start and open additional phrases in dialogues. Other classes and a couple of additional skill branches can be opened later.
As you set off to Arrakis, a certain Zantara shoots down your ship, kills most of the survivors, but for some reason saves your life and sends you forth into the world. In the company of Zantara, communicating via radio, we spend the next couple of hours, during which the tutorial stage will take its place.
From now on, you will be doing the classic “survival” routine, moving from one story bit to another. The main mechanics of survival on Arrakis are thirst and noise. You don’t have to keep an eye on hundreds of needs in the form of hunger, sleep and many dozens of other parameters are usually placed in this genre of games.
Thirst determines how long you can survive and is spent depending on the environment and the character’s actions: running fast in the sun? The character is overheating and thus receives an increased water consumption. Therefore, it is always worth taking a couple of bottles of water on long journeys, just in case. But the player will not be left without any water at all out in the wilderness: some grass grows almost everywhere, from which you can collect a small amount of dew; a blood collector allows you to pump blood from corpses. Consuming blood temporarily reduces the overall health points, but it is still better than dying of thirst in the middle of the desert, and then stubbornly trekking back for a lost backpack. The collected blood can later be purified at the base and distilled into water.
Later, you will be able to craft a stillsuit, which will collect the character’s fluids and convert them into water, slightly increasing the overall supply. But in general, at the moment, in my opinion, this mechanic is not harsh enough for players. When traveling around the world, you forget about thirst in three hours tops, there is no shortage of water at all (although the setting claims the opposite), even though 98% of the water goes into crafting.
Noise/vibration mechanically replaces weight, affects stealth and detection of the character by worms in the desert. Overload does not reduce the speed of movement (thank the gods, at least somewhere you can keep your speed at max!), but increases the chance of being eaten when moving carelessly through the desert. The character’s equipment and movement also affect the noise on the sand. Run on the sand for a couple of minutes while heavily loaded, with the shield and antigrav turned on, and you will soon find yourself in the company of neighbors from below, politely inquiring who the hell is making noise around here. The intensity of the noise/vibrations emitted is displayed at the bottom of the screen, and shows if a worm is nearby.
This mechanic may look broken, but I think it’s well-balanced and adds at least a little tension to the rather meditative and chill gameplay. When mining sand or spice, you won’t be able to stay in one place for too long, and when moving, you should take into account the risks of being eaten and losing all your loot forever. Yes, unlike most Survival MMOs, you can only completely lose all your goods by dying to a worm or in a particularly powerful storm. But sometimes the worm leaves behind a gift in the form of a tooth, which can be turned into a disposable uber-powerful dagger that one-shots almost any enemy, the signature weapon of the Fremen.
During the exploration of the world, you will come across various shipwrecks, ruins and camps of local residents here and there, and adventuring through them will take almost the entire time of the game. We will have to trudge tens of kilometers along these activities in search of special resources, under contracts and during the plot. Also, there are hidden research points and unique blueprints necessary for expanding the possibilities of crafting scattered around such places.
But, due to the fact that in the first couple of hours of the game you learn to create your motorcycle, such filling of the world does not feel stuffy, the journey from one point of interest to another takes at most a minute, unlike Conan, in which you could run to the nearest dungeon for half an hour with the risk of dying in the nearest ditch. The map displays all the dungeons, outposts and resources encountered.
Local “dungeons” differ in scale and content despite the overall visual monotony. In one of them, I spent half an hour before returning to the exit. And in another, the exit was a couple of meters away from the beginning. The dungeons are mostly filled with local marauders, but sometimes you can encounter more serious opponents, in one such dungeon I met a sardaukar who somehow got there. In the future, I hope the number and types of enemies will increase. Also, in each region there is an outpost where you can take assignments, talk to representatives of the factions and trade.
The faction war is not yet presented, but you can already earn loyalty points for the Harkonnens or the Atreides by becoming their hidden agent and completing the assignments they offer. All quests in the game are presented in the “find / bring / kill” format, and only the story quests are more or less meaningful in any significant way. In the currently present main quests, players study the Fremen past by visiting their old temples and being sent into visions that are presented in gameplay as microlocations with easy tests and a voice broadcasting lore in the background.
This lore addition is a pleasant surprise, it is well transferred from the original books and not distorted. It is clear, structured and faithful to the original, which is a great bonus for me. I hope at the release we will get a full-fledged city with side plots for factions and more spectacular events.
Dune: Awakening has a battle system. It exists and functions, even if it feels pretty bland, but it is not without its spectacular moments here and there.
The player character has melee weapons, various firearms, a set of gadgets and psionic abilities. In melee combat, you can parry, dodge and deliver blows of two types. A heavy blow is designed to break through shields, and inflicts a lot of damage to their owners, and with a light blow you simply click the enemy to death, soulslike-style.
There were a few firearms options in the beta, but the most effective was the Disruptor, the submachine gun that breaks through the shields of opponents. Yes, it eats up a lot of ammunition, but it is better than running around with a knife trying to remove the enemy’s shield under continuous fire from his friends. This is where player abilities also come to the rescue, some of which, frankly, seem useless. For example, a high-explosive grenade can only harm low-level opponents, and The Voice (Compel) only works on one opponent at a time. It is better to choose a grappling hook, which gives great mobility, or a turret that ignores enemy shields and inflicts colossal damage.
Although later, all 5 Archetypes of talents can show their stronger sides: the grenade will be stronger, the Voice will give an opportunity to pass by the crowd unnoticed and so on, but… You know it, there is always a “but”. You need to look for teachers, complete their tasks and only after that they will be able to unlock stronger upgrades of archetypes.
And so it would seem like the game has all the opportunities for creating spectacular battles, but everything breaks apart against wooden, dull opponents who VERY rarely remember that they, in fact, can do something. Often these are melee fighters in a force shield, sometimes a fight can drag on for a couple of minutes of poking and prodding the enemy’s defenses in search of a moment to deliver a finishing blow. But sometimes shooters also remember that the enemy can be pinned behind cover and approached from the flanks. Basically, opponents are sponges for bullets, just standing and obediently waiting for death. I hope they will be fixed in the future.
Crafting and building features have not changed much since the time of Conan, they have only acquired some improvements in use. The only difference is that you can build on a certain plot of land, called a fief, the size of which can be increased as the character develops and grows stronger and more influential. The fief and its owner are subordinate to the Emperor and must pay tribute in gold and spice from time to time. If you miss a payment, the government will charge fines and eventually send collectors for forced eviction. The time frame is unclear for now, the time for collecting the tithe is linked to the shutdown of the servers. Inside the fief, the player is free to build and do whatever their imagination and power generator allow them to do (needed for workbenches, reinforced doors, and other things that eat up electricity)
The construction is still modular and allows you to first outline what you want to build, and only then, if you have the material, build it. In the beta, only two building styles were available, but this was enough to build something that looked not like a box of dirt from Minecraft, but like a beautiful and multifunctional house. Visually, the game looks nice, but like all games on UE5, it really wants all the resources of your hardware, and sometimes gives noticeable FPS drops. Stylistically, the world is a monotonous desert, but it looks unique for each region, and in general it feels quite atmospheric. The only thing is that the animation and faces of the characters in the world look as if they came from SWtOR, but as for me, this is not very critical (you only meet them once every 5-6 hours when you come to the outpost)
To sum it up, Dune: Awakening turned out to be a very good survival game that took over more than 24 hours of my life without me even noticing. It does not strangle you with intentionally complicated restrictions, it has some kind of plot, and in general it conveys the atmosphere of life on a desert planet well.
Does it feel like Dune? Not quite, replace Arrakis with Tatooine, and the population with cartels and imperials and nothing will change. Any setting will do. Otherwise, this is a pretty cool project, and I could recommend it to the fans of the genre.
