With Dune Awakening just a few weeks away from launch, I’ve finally taken a deep-dive into the game to see whether it’s worth the hype – and worth the price tag. Funcom invited press to play Dune Awakening for the past couple of weeks, specifically in the areas of the Hagga Basin. Thankfully, it was not a curated or guided tour; Funcom allowed us to jump into the game as if we were new players and explore the game as we liked. At first, I attempted to approach the game as a survival game where the goal was to gather and build to survive. That didn’t seem to work well. Then I tried to approach the game as if it were a sandbox MMORPG, and that seemed to work out better. Maybe that’s the way I should have handled it from the beginning.
Let me not bury the lede: I’m torn. I really do not know what to think of the game. On the one hand, it seems that the directors at Funcom enjoy the Dune universe and have buried many Easter eggs that tug at nostalgia and make me feel as if I’m actually on Arrakis. On the other hand, it feels as if there’s been someone pulling at the directors and telling them that the game would be too difficult if they didn’t hold the player’s hand through parts of it, even most of it. Despite being on the most dangerous planet in the galaxy, I might as well have been on a camping trip on Caladan.
Walk without rhythm, and it won’t attract the worm – aka the survivalist approach
I expected a little tutorial to get me started and maybe gain my first set of items. Few survival games dump you naked onto a random spot on the map and send you on your way anymore. Most have a tutorial on how to get things done, and after that, then you are dumped back onto the map with minimal gear and a dream.
That is how I thought Dune Awakening was going to operate. My character was taken as a prisoner and sent to Arrakis. Shortly after traversing folded space between worlds, the prison ship was shot down and crashed in what I would later find out was the Hagga Basin. I was rescued by a character named Zantara, who led me through how to make minimal gear and eventually left me to survive in the basin. I was on my own, or so I thought.
At this point in a typical survival game, I start gathering mats and avoiding bandits or local fauna. Since the local fauna were the tiny muad’dib and the giant sandworms called shai’hulud, bandits were my only real concern. Mirroring nearly every other survival game, Dune created all NPCs to be immediately hostile toward you except in very specific areas. The tutorial gave me a knife and a dart pistol, and I was able to make short work of nearly all bandits I ran into. And before I knew it, my pack overflowed with raw materials I had zero clue what to do with. I should probably make some shelter or something along those lines, right?
Let me pause here and address a couple of things that watchers of the Dune movies or fans of the series might be wondering: Dart guns? Doesn’t everyone use swords and knives because of the Holtzman shields? This is true when going into battle or fighting a war. Like my character at the beginning of the game, many NPCs do not have those shields either, and dart guns can be very effective. I thought it was a clever and effective explanation. I might be in the minority, but I thought that combat mechanics against the NPCs who actually had Holtzman shields was clever, too. If I simply sliced at them, it would have next to zero effect, but if I let them attack me first then block the attack at the right moment, it will cause them to baulk. When the NPC stumbles, I could hit and hold my attack button, causing my character to perform a slow attack, greatly injuring or outright killing the NPC.
By far, the most immersive mechanic is thirst. “Bless the Maker and His water” is a quote built into the religion of the Fremen. Water is the most important resource, and gathering it becomes paramount. There are flowers near some rock formations that I could gather some moisture from, but I started coughing and could not gather more than a fourth of my fill of water from them. I could survive that way, but it would require that I constantly drink from the flowers. As in the book series and movies, water could be gathered from fallen enemies, but it required purification first in a station at my house; alternatively, if I wore a stillsuit, a portion of water could be actively refilled if I wore the suit long enough. I enjoyed that mechanic, too. As I adventured, I would periodically hit a key to fill up my thirst meter. The suit didn’t produce enough to sustain me constantly, but it would take the edge off if I ever fell below a 25%.
Water, or lack thereof, was the only mechanic that gave me any fear of failure, which is a requirement for any good survival game.
Everything points back to Star Wars Galaxies – seriously
When Star Wars Galaxies launched, it had nothing that would be considered a tutorial. For many people, including me, that was part of the game’s charm. Then the corporation behind its license stepped in and said that people weren’t getting it. The game needed a tutorial; players needed more hand-holding. I think we all saw what ultimately became of that. I’m getting that same vibe from Dune now.
My first frustration with Dune Awakening appeared when I had a backpack full of crap and no place to put it. I had skill points (called intel in the game) and nothing to learn. Everything appeared to be locked behind something. I would later learn that I had to complete a quest to unlock housing, then I had to build specific pieces for that quest to continue, then even later, the questline would require that I abandon that building and construct a new one in a different part of the map.
For every skill that I learned in this early part of the game, the bar for progression was a bit of a questline and not the number of intel points I had. Eventually, the game reversed it on me. An advanced stillsuit became available in research, so I learned it, but then I was unable to unlock the advanced mining tool because I didn’t have the intel points, even though it was required for the next part of the questline. In response, I didn’t unlock anything that the questline didn’t tell me to unlock from that point forward. And I was no longer playing a survival game. I was suddenly playing a sandbox MMORPG with a very long opening themepark questline a la SWG post-NGE.
The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to experience
Buried in the code of Dune Awakening is a challenging and fun game where you are thrown into the heart of Arrakis and have to literally fight to survive. Buried in the code of Dune Awakening is a sandbox (pun intended) where the journey and discovery are more important than fulfilling the obligation of some questline. Buried in the code of Dune Awakening is a reality to experience over a problem to solve.
I appreciate that Funcom invited press to experience the game before its release so we could write about it. I believe many people who created this game have a love of the franchise and a deep understanding of the lore around Arrakis. I hope the later game (the parts we were not allowed to see yet) opens up to allow players to explore and even fail as they see fit. For now, it remains as it is: an MMORPG pretending to be a survival game, but not quite living up to the expectations of either.
