If a Dune game has a rite of passage, surely it's being swallowed by a sandworm. It happened to me about 10 hours into the Dune: Awakening beta and it took me quite a while to recover, because there was no chance of running back to collect my dropped gear like you can when you die from other causes. I respawned in my underpants, but everything else swallowed by that massive sandworm was just plain gone.
In addition to easily replaceable stuff like the ores I'd been harvesting and some consumables like bandages, I lost the weapons I'd crafted, my water collection tools, and even a unique piece of gear I'd 3D printed from a single-use schematic. Worst of all, my precious stillsuit, the Fremen-designed survival clothing I'd only just excitedly crafted for the first time an hour earlier, was gone forever too.
That's an extreme but fitting consequence for passing through the digestive system of Shai-Hulud, and I love it. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely hated losing all that stuff: it set me back hours. But it changed the game for me. I'd been seeing sandworms every time I crossed the desert, but losing everything to one of them turned them from an abstract threat to a major, clawing fear.
That's one of the reasons I'm sold on Dune: Awakening as a survival game after about 25 hours in the beta. The rest of the MMO, I'm not so sure about just yet.
Important note: The Dune: Awakening beta I took part in only contained the first three areas of the world, very little story and minimal quests, and only lower-tier crafting. It was basically the intro to the game up to the mid-early game: no deep desert, no ornithopters, no spice harvesting, very few story quests, so opinions are based on a pretty small slice of the full game that's coming out on June 10.
Fun in the sun
In true survival fashion, you begin Dune: Awakening weak and fragile. Stand in the sun too long and you'll dehydrate. Need a drink? Lick dew off a few sparse plants. Need to cross from one rocky area to another across the scalding sand? Do it at a full sprint because each footstep alerts a sandworm to your presence, then quickly get back in the shade and lick whatever plants you find to avoid dropping dead from dehydration on the spot.
Over the hours all of that gets easier as there are more ways to harvest water (including from the blood of your enemies), protect yourself from the sun (better Fremen clothing), and avoid sandworms (I crafted a speeder bike with a turbo engine that gets me over those dunes pretty quickly.)
But even with more tools, those survival challenges remain: crafting higher-tier ores requires water, for example, so you'll need much more of it to get by. And the temperature is higher in other regions, so you'll quickly bake even if you've got improved gear.
You won't be surprised to hear there are no trees to chop down on Arrakis, but there are lots of boulders to bust to collect stone for your first tiny base. It's a fun system, though: scan each rock to reveal its natural faultline, then cut along the glowing line to shatter it efficiently. You can do the same with large hunks of spaceship detritus (there's a war going on overhead), and cutting up ruined vehicles is especially fun as you carve them into smaller and smaller pieces. Way better than just mindless whacking things with a pickaxe.
The crafting system itself isn't particularly interesting as an activity: except for a few items you can craft personally (crude blades, bandages, etc.) it's all done with machinery in your base, and most of what I did in the beta involved ingots made from harvesting minerals like granite, copper, and iron, plus certain gizmos that can be bought at trading posts or scavenged from camps and caves. There were no elaborate recipes, and apart from watching the 3D printer assemble your chosen schematic, it felt pretty standard for a survival game.
But there's still a lot of excitement crafting it because of all the Dune history involved. Crafting and wearing a Fremen-style stillsuit for the first time isn't just cool because of how it gives you a way to recycle your personal water supply, it's cool because it's a fascinating sci-fi concept I read about in Frank Herbert's novel all those years ago—and now I get to actually wear my very own.
Each little tech milestone I reached was a moment of satisfaction and excitement.
When I finally crafted a Holtzman shield and activated it, it was kind of a thrill, and not just because I'd seen NPCs using it to protect themselves from my dart guns. Shields are a piece of Dune technology that has a huge place in the fiction. And now I'm wearing one, too.
I can't levitate quite as smoothly as those Harkonnen soldiers in the opening of Dune: Part 2, but crafting a device called Emperor's Wings (which the sandworm digested later) let me do a sort of hover-glide that meant I didn't take fall damage. Each little tech milestone I reached was a moment of satisfaction and excitement. Now I'm dying to do other Dune stuff I've seen and read about, like pilot an ornithopter and harvest spice in my very own crawler.
Whatcha Dune?
What I'm a little unsure of after 25 hours is the MMO itself: the trappings don't do much for immersion in the world of Dune, unfortunately. Even though this was a beta just for press and influencers, with 4 different servers just for North America, the server I was on was already covered with ugly, boxy player-made bases when I got started on the first day.
Not wanting to contribute to the clutter, I ran most of the way across the starter map to a deserted spot near the region's trade port. The next time I logged in, my little base was flanked by two huge ones other players had built maybe 20 feet from my front door.
Over the two weeks of the beta I saw more and more bases spring up (and a lot of half-built ones abandoned) and even when players obviously put thought and work into them they still all looked like boxy and brutalist constructions that don't really fit in with the nomadic feel of the world. (My base was also a boring box, to be clear.)
Meanwhile, there are caves, camps, and research stations hidden in the rocky areas of the map that would feel more appropriate to inhabit, instead of every offworlder building their own big gray cement cubicle in every free spot on the map. I know I'm being picky, but if I got tired of seeing these ugly bases (including my own) in just a few hours of a press beta, how bad is it going to be after launch when the servers fill up with regular players?
I didn't get to go wild with the combat: I played a basic trooper and not a more exotic mentat or Bene Gesserit. I focused on softening up enemies with an explosive seeker and then dropping them with dart guns, only switching to a blade if someone had a shield on because other than blocking and slow-stabbing I didn't have better melee options. (There's a swordsman class with a big skill tree, but no sword trainer in the beta, so my trooper couldn't learn any new melee moves.)
There weren't a lot of enemy types in the beta, either: I'd usually come across a mix of one fighter with a Holtzman shield and blade charging me while gunners peppered me from a distance. I found a nice solution with a disruptor gun that chewed through shields and a shotgun that chewed through bodies. Again, we didn't have access to much besides starter weapons, but for an MMO, the ranged combat felt OK.
My other concern for the world is that it's pretty bland and drab so far. I know, it's a desert! What can I really expect? But in Mad Max, Avalanche really pulled it off well, making various desert regions distinct and visually interesting. I'm hopeful that's the case here: there were only three zones in the beta so I'm not saying Funcom hasn't managed this same feat, but variety just isn't something I saw in the time I spent there. On the major plus side, you can climb literally anything in Dune, and with a grappling hook and suspenders, moving around the towering rocky spires of the world is a lot of fun.
As a survival game, I had a lot of fun with Dune: Awakening's beta, and I'm excited to play more and get further than the beta allowed. The limited view of the MMO the beta allowed didn't really grab me, but hopefully the deeper I get to go when the game launches in June, the more I'll find.
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