I felt like I knew a lot about Dune Awakening, having absorbed much of the survival MMO's broader concepts via osmosis. I'd heard about its giant sandworms being their own masters, and its air-to-air ornithopter combat. But until about half an hour ago, I didn't have a clear picture about how all those ideas came together.
Sure, Funcom's latest might be a ground-up replication of the desert survival, high-level politicking, and factional wars of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic. But what does that mean for me, Joe Fremen? What do I actually do?
Thanks to Funcom's latest trailer, I now have a much clearer idea of what the game's fundamentals are. 'Exploring Arrakis' is the most concise distillation of the game's basic ideas. It's notionally about how players will seek to tame the game's vast desert wilderness, but it also acts as a step-by-step guide for its early hours of play.
The trailer takes you through all the basics of establishing yourself on Arrakis, from founding your first base, to crafting your first vehicle, to venturing out into the desert to perform surveys for vital resources, which may lead you to uncover points of interest like crashed spaceships, all of which will help craft new weapons and equipment, and expand your base.
Likewise, what comes across in the trailer is the physicality of Awakening. The term 'MMO' tends to conjure images of hotkey abilities and cooldown timers. But Awakening's basic play seems to have a far more tangible quality to it. Your resource scanner only works in a small area at ground level, but you can climb mountains and rocky outcrops to perform larger environmental surveys. It also shows off some nifty traversal mechanics, like a grappling hook and the "suspensor belt", which lets you hover over the ground.
Finally, the trailer provides a glimpse of one of Dune Awakening's most interesting concepts, its Coriolis Storms. Designed to reflect how deserts change as the weather sculpts their dunes anew, these vast sandstorms will occur in the game's PvP 'deep deserts', completely reshaping these areas to uncover new resources and points of interest on a weekly basis.
Through this, Funcom aims for the deep deserts to offer "infinite exploration". The trailer also implies these storms will not just be an abstract map wipe, but actual in-game systems that you'll be able to drive (or fly your ornithopter) through. Presumably, taking such a risk will help you get first dibs on all those fresh goodies, though that's purely my own interpretation.
You can watch the full trailer above. PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens got hands-on with Dune Awakening at the start of the year, and was impressed by how the game derived primarily from the Dune fiction, rather than grafting Herbert's world onto a standard survival template.
"The exploration, the RPG elements, the combat. It was there to serve the characterisation of Arrakis, not the other way around," he wrote back in January. We're still yet to see how its higher-level faction systems and player politics will work, but it won't be long before we find out, as the game launches on May 20.
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