Dunes: Ongoing Awakening Comments
Blog Andrew Joseph 09 Jun , 2025 0
If you've been on the dunes for more than 35 hours, there's no doubt one thing: awakening, and that's Funcom did homework in making the most authentic Dune-iverse pieces. It's an incredible thing to be a longtime fan of Frank Herbert's iconic sci-fi environment, and my time on Arrakis is filled with real shock moments. Strong environments and empty spaces are repeatedly used as progress checks, which is very clever to turn them into weaknesses. At other times, this persistence in the legend established by this persistence leads to annoying or simple boring thrill, like you are almost forced to take a nomadic lifestyle in a genre where taking root and building a base is one of the fundamentals. There were still a lot of technical issues and errors in the days since the release, plus the battle wasn't with me too much (though I'm sure I'm still coming up very early in making combat builds), but overall, my friends and my friends were absolutely great.
If you’ve played survival games before (and watched a Dune movie), you’ll know most of the things you need to feel in the giant sand worms: You’ll collect materials from the world, build your own ugly houses, and upgrade equipment to use rare materials to enter more dangerous areas. Like a lot of survival games, including Funcom's own Conan Exiles or the humans who were once last year, all happen on servers that are permanently filled with tanned players in an online world where collaboration and limited instances of PVP are unique possibilities, both the best moment.
But what makes this game unique is how well it adheres to its legendary environment, which has a significant impact on everything you do. For example, smart use is made from the harsh environment of Arrakis that is actually the weapon you use every second in its atmosphere. Standing directly in the sun, unprotected people will bake you alive in seconds, if you can’t shelter first, then Sandstorms will blow in regularly and will kill you, and most notably, if you dare to trample on the domain for a long time, that’s the problem with those annoying human-made worms. Through a world that tends to be tolerant like it, awakening keeps you fighting the earth itself. So instead of hanging out in your spare time to collect resources and settle your own tiny pieces, you hid frantically behind the rocks to avoid the harsh irritating rays of the sun, drinking the little water you have left, and playing the endless game of “Floor is Lava” on shai-hulud the shai-hulud hot to shai-hulud hot holes.
All these hazards give you obstacles to overcome. For example, you can't leave the tutorial area due to the huge space gap, and if you try to walk, the huge worm will surely kill you, so you have to make the first car to safely cross it. Later, you start to encounter places that are too hot or irradiated to explore without proper equipment. There are many examples like this, the unique nature of the setup becomes an interesting mechanic. Similarly, you keep starving water, which is both used as a crafting material and a resource to keep yourself alive, and generally awakening is a better, more fun survival game.
But at other times, this zealous compliance with the Dune Convention can be annoying, for example, how do you encourage (in some cases) to move your operating base to a place when you unlock access to a high-rise area. Extracting the bet means you either have to give up everything that has arrived at that time or tediously resettled as much equipment as you can. Then there are things like this, such as guns, usually useless, as many enemies take advantage of the most important Holtzman shield that fully protects ranged attacks. This creates a strange situation where you juggle back and forth between guns and melee weapons, depending on the situation where the enemy is currently running towards you, usually having to choose between solving the swordsman, or using chaingun behind him with that guy a few feet behind him to solve a very oppressive rhythm, which is a very oppressive rhythm. Honestly, I kind of respect how many dunes: wake up the guns and invalidate them from staying invalid with Dune Lore, even if it sometimes comes at the expense of my good time. Even if these things bother me, I can’t help but respect it.
That's just part of the reason, like nearly every peer, Dune: Awakening has a really bad fight. I know to go into survival MMO, but it's still a particularly bitter pill that never gets easier to swallow. I still unlocked all combat options early on and saw some more fun weapons and builds available, but so far the gunfight is sloppy, melee combat is repetitive, repetitive and clumsy like heck, and I've just been trying to fix it as soon as possible. This is a low point in the game I originally liked.
Thankfully, Miss Battle is not just made up for by absolutely excellent viability, it is the most thoughtful and refined I have had in some time. With little filling or grinding in the process, there is a range of new technologies, equipment for research and materials for searching. Whenever I gather the right materials to make the latest shiny thing I want, I immediately have another tempting item to chase, and when the unique schematics drop left and right, I always make the interesting decision whether to place my rarest materials on the rarest materials with special effects instead of taking a more conservative route, just to save those resources to save those resources. (It will inevitably rain in arrakis these days.)
They have done such an excellent cycle in a desert world, with little to no plant or wildlife to harvest except hot sand, which is particularly impressive. A major sign of survival games is to slam trees, and there are no trees on Arrakis – instead you are making tools to collect water in the world at night and by pulling it out of the air, which is really clever, and the welcome change in speed can also contain weird and barren environments, even if it is basically the same thing.
When I played the beta of Dune: Awakening, I encountered a lot of bugs, hoping that the delay of its launch would improve. Of course, this is indeed the case, as my experience has been more stable so far, but even with progress it is still troubled in the technology sector. I've disconnected and seen the entire mountain disappear and reappear in front of my eyes, and even for hours, all the sand worms just got up and removed themselves from existence, which flocked everyone on the server to resources that are usually protected by their ongoing threats. This isn't the smoothest launch of any stretch, but the worst is far away.
After over 35 hours, I still feel like I've entered the Dunes very early: Awakening Adventure, still have new areas to visit, no entry into the main story, and only a few encounters with PVP. I have a lot to do, so look for updates sometime this week when I get to the last game.