Friends, I have consumed a lifechanging amount of mind-altering substances and reduced my brain to wet goo, and in return the tides of time have revealed to me the release date for Dune: Awakening, Funcom's survival MMO take on Herbert's sandy-verse that I had a surprisingly good time with at a demo last month. Now you're all the recipients of the same grand message, because the studio's gone and put out a release date trailer today.
Dune: Awakening hits PC on May 20 this year for $50, with console release dates yet to come. For some reason—probably because of my Pavlovian response to anything under the 'survival' rubric—I keep thinking of the game's launch as an early access thing, but that's not right. May 20 will be the game's full, 1.0 release. I didn't know we were allowed to do those anymore.
The trailer itself shows off a lot of the earlier parts of the game that I saw in my demo. You play a minion dispatched by the Bene Gesserit to "find the Fremen" and "awaken the sleeper" in the game's alternate-timeline version of Arrakis where Paul Atreides was never born and houses Harkonnen and Atreides are locked in a War of Assassins. Your ship crashes, a fella in a stillsuit helps you out, and off you go building yourself a little home, wasting scavengers, and plundering dungeons for resources.
If you've not been following this one, perhaps you because you share my kneejerk lack of interest in things both 'survival' and 'MMO,' I'd encourage you to put that aside. My time with Dune: Awakening was genuinely fun and exciting, in no small part because I found I could leave behind a lot of the humdrum stuff you usually do in games like this (tree-punching, arduous resource-collection) to get into the meat of its exploration and outré, very Dune-y combat. Also I made a little bald Harkonnen fella who was just the absolute weirdest kind of freak.
Though I didn't get hands-on time with later-game stuff, Funcom makes that sound pretty intriguing as well. Once you've got the basics of survival down, the game moves into the political realm, with you and whatever player faction you've signed up to manoeuvring in the Landsraad (Dune's space-parliament) to secure laws and procedures that help you out and screw over your enemies. If the studio pulls that off, I anticipate some EVE Online-style political madness as players concoct grand schemes to stab one another in the back.
