If you're anything like me, the first time you heard about Dune: Awakening, your ears perked up at the phrase 'they're making a Dune game,' then immediately shut off at 'and it's a survival MMO'.
But this was, I think, a mistake. After a positive first impression at a hands-off demo last year, I've finally had a chance to sit down and play Funcom's upcoming sand simulator for about 7 hours. Folks, this might be the one that snares me.
It's not that I've seen the light on the genre—I still don't have whatever it is that makes other people enjoy other survival games, it's just that Dune: Awakening doesn't quite feel like other survival games. It feels like, well, Dune. The game's producer, Nils Ryborg, says that's entirely the point. "Yes, we're making a survival game, but we're making a Dune game, right? One of the design models we have is: make the game fit Dune, don't make Dune fit the game."
Molto Bene
So in true Frank Herbert fashion, Funcom is getting weird with it—zagging where you expect it to zig with Awakening's plot. If you've not been following the pre-release buzz, the big idea is that this is an alternate timeline. Paul Atreides—Muad'Dib himself—was never born.
Instead, the Lady Jessica gave birth to a daughter just as her Bene Gesserit masters ordered, meaning she's still in their good graces and the society gave her the tools necessary to uncover Doctor Yue's betrayal. No Paul, no Yue, and no quick decapitation strike against Duke Leto means Houses Harkonnen and Atreides are locked in a bitter, mutually destructive War of Assassins on the surface of Arrakis.
This is where you come in. You're not Paul, you're not Leto, you're not even Gurney Halleck. Instead of those guys—history in an ornithopter—you're just an MMO protagonist: a weird little custom guy. You get a choice of homeworld and mentor (speccing you into one of the game's talent trees like Mentat, Bene Gesserit, and Swordmaster), and off you go, dispatched by the Bene Gesserit to Arrakis to "find the Fremen" and "awaken the sleeper". Even though the imperial authorities claim to have wiped the Fremen out, the game doesn't waste any time acting like you might believe them for a second.
Water burden
A quick ship-crash and tutorial later and, plonk, there you are, right on the unforgiving surface of Arrakis in the game's Hagga Basin area: a big, wide space, large enough that even the other players you share it with are a relatively rare sight.
It's here that I braced myself for that old, familiar long-haul: Punch a tree, build a base, constantly nurse a set of ever-depleting meters. Survival game stuff. But I didn't find it. Rather than being tied to a base, disinhibited from proper exploration and risk-taking by hunger, warmth, sleep, and what-have-you, Dune: Awakening had me roaming far and wide, plundering dungeons and getting in scraps almost immediately.
Even this early on, it's apparent that Funcom is more interested in making something that captures Dune's vibe rather than following the survival game herd, and that's why it successfully grabbed me. Food and sleep aren't an issue—did Paul ever have to worry about meals while he walked the desert with his mother?—but water is. Building up your stores is vital. You can suck the blood out of fallen enemies and convert it to H20, sup at the pouches of your stillsuit (if you have one), even build moisture-traps and other Fremen-flavoured water-capture gear if you get further down the construction tech tree than I did.
By the end, when I was whipping across the desert on a sandbike and headshotting enemies with an Atreides rifle, I felt like Lisan al Gaib himself.
Water is the primary, pretty much only, survival requirement you need to pay constant attention to, but even then it doesn't limit your ability to go explore Dune's world. In a little deviation from the books—where Dune's surface is practically barren of life save for scraps of flora and little muad'dib mice—the game's opening areas are pockmarked semi-regularly with patches of veiny grass. If things are bad enough (and they are, regularly) you can suck the roots to fill your water meter up to its first pip, but no further.
It's something Funcom thinks about a lot. Says Ryborg: "Trying to streamline the experience into one thing, where everyone feels an appropriate amount of suffering, has been a challenge," and has involved a bunch of playtests with both survival game die-hards and novices. "Water discipline's really important [to Dune], and so that's been the primary survival mechanic we've focused on… we're trying to make water scarce—difficult to get—but not to the point where you can't play the rest of the game."
In my experience, it works. As someone who is simply never going to care all that much about building a base, I was happy to find that Dune: Awakening was content for me to knock together a slapdash assortment of manufacturing and refining gear in an out-of-the-way cave and let me spend most of my time away from home, roving around the Basin plundering ecological research stations and crashed ships (there's a war on, after all) for higher-level materials and loot: the stuff and schematics to make stillsuits, armour, better Kindjal blades and rifles. Even in my brief time with the game, my increases in power felt steady and meaningful. By the end, when I was whipping across the desert on a sandbike and headshotting enemies with an Atreides rifle, I felt like Lisan al Gaib himself.
That's not to say you can't get deep into building if that's your inclination. My adventures took me past a lot of bases constructed by fellow journos that were far more elaborate and impressive than my slipshod garden shed—multi-story cliffside condos, imposing fortresses, all sorts of architectural marvels to house your trophies in. But I only had eyes for new gear, vehicles, and weapons.
Quickdraws and slow blades
You'll need that new gear whether you become Arrakis' Frank Lloyd Wright or not. Combat in Dune: Awakening is idiosyncratic and Herbertian. In the earliest early game, there's not much to make it stand out—I spent my time sneaking up on NPC scavenger camps and popping the inhabitants in the head with my improvised Maula pistol, but once I'd spent an hour or two getting my fundamentals down, the game started mixing it up.
Enemies with shields are not rare in Dune: Awakening, and the shields are Dune shields; they're not just an extra health bar. They don't deplete with each hit and you can't penetrate them with anything but a slow blade or a special type of gun called a disruptor, which I never even caught a whiff of in my time with this build.
It makes combat—which, shieldless as I was, hurts a lot—a constant process of evaluation. What do you do when you have two schmucks on a ridge firing at you and another one, shielded, charging your direction with a blade? Focusing on either means equipping a weapon that simply can't do anything to the other, opening you up to a quick death. Making use of your talent-tree abilities—in my case, a couple of Bene Gesserit tricks that let me stunlock foes and become briefly invisible to individual enemies—is essential.
Once you get into other, harsher areas, the choices build up. I was forced to trade out my protective armour for a stillsuit in the hotter, dryer second area I got to, preventing me from getting thirsty quite so quickly but opening up my soft, squishy body to blades and bullets. It's a constant process of trade-offs that feels quick, harsh and brutal. Appropriate, then.
Funcom hasn't shown off much of the game's melee combat in its marketing yet, which isn't very Dune-like of it, but I can understand why. The gunplay feels pretty good, weighty and impactful, though some enemies get a bit spongey, especially when you aren't headshotting them. Melee, on the other hand, still feels light on weight and feedback.
The parry system, which you'll use a lot to open up your melee foes to a damaging slow-blade attack, feels particularly odd, almost like there's an element of lag between your input and the enemy's output. Funcom says it's aware of the deficiencies, though, and is still working on getting the melee ship-shape for release.
I didn't get to experience PvP. In the interests of not making your opening hours miserable, Funcom divides Arrakis into multiple varieties of zone. Most of them, like the starting Hagga Basin, are PvE. You'll see other players hopping about but you won't be able to hurt them. Others, like the hub areas for Houses Harkonnen and Atreides, where you'll pick up quests and deepen your reputation with the game's factions, are zero-combat. It's only the Deep Desert—a siloed-off area filled with the game's rarest and most valuable materials for players and their organisations to war over—and certain dungeons, often those crashed ships, that will let you put your arsenal to use against fellow players, Bene Gesserit tricks and all. Alas, I didn't get a chance to fight my peers. We games writers are a cowardly lot.
The land's rad
So I enjoyed my time with Dune: Awakening, not because I am a fresh convert to the survival genre, but because the game's adaptation of that genre to Dune meant it never felt like it obstructed my engagement with the rest of its systems: the exploration, the RPG elements, the combat. It was there to serve the characterisation of Arrakis, not the other way around.
But all this survival stuff, says Funcom, is really just an early-game loop. In the devs' vision, your immediate concerns of water and sunstroke will eventually give way to something more high-minded, more political. "We have this really natural transition into an endgame that is not about the survival of, like, you getting enough water to survive the day," says Ryborg, "but instead it becomes a matter of surviving the cut-throat political environment of the universe."
At some point, you'll go from a peon scrabbling in the sand to a mover and shaker in Dune's political heart: the Landsraad, even creating your own minor houses and trying to get the galaxy's most esteemed politicos to pass laws that benefit you and hinder your foes. "We're going to go in a direction where we allow for more of the political fantasy to be fulfilled." At least, once you've properly accounted for that first layer on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
In my paltry few hours with the game, I never got even close to experiencing this stuff, so it's all just a twinkle in Funcom's eye to me, but I admit it sounds intriguing. Building yourself up into a political force once you've bent Arrakis to your will sounds like a very interesting proposition. It sounds tense, it sounds complex, it sounds, really, just like Dune.
You can find Dune: Awakening on Steam, where it has a release date of 2025.
