Dune: Awakening’s First 20 Hours Are Damn Impressive, Despite Loads of Bugs – Closed Beta Impressions

When I first saw a demo of Dune: Awakening over a year ago, I went from being skeptical that a survival game on the famously barren world of Arrakis could even work, to being absolutely hyped to get my hands on it. Now, after enduring the unforgiving conditions and hostile lifeforms of a desert planet for nearly 20 hours in the closed beta, I’m confident developer Funcom has the foundations of an absolutely stellar MMO that makes fantastic use of one of the greatest science fiction worlds ever created. Harvesting raw materials from the brutal wasteland, constructing bases, upgrading your character and loadout, and then bringing all of that to bear against raiders and rival houses is just about as good as I’d hoped for. That said, I still feel like I only got a small taste of the larger game, as all of the major social spaces, most of the PvP, and especially any of the all-important endgame areas were kept out of reach. And it’s also no wonder the release date for Dune: Awakening was pushed back a month while I was in the beta, as the build I played was absolutely rife with bugs and performance issues that will definitely need ironing out. Even so, I was quite impressed by the vast majority of what I saw, and am more optimistic than ever that they might just be able to pull this thing off.

If you only just recently got spat back up by a Shai Hulud, Dune: Awakening is an upcoming massively multiplayer survival game from the team of developers who gave us the quite underrated Conan Exiles. The premise is simple: you find yourself on Arrakis and have to find a way to not die there, and if you know even a little about the setting, then you should understand just how tall of an order that is. In typical survival game fashion, you’ll start off with almost nothing, and turn piles of rocks and scraps of metal harvested from the wilds into tools to help you survive, building shelter along the way to protect yourself from the harsh environment. While you might (and frankly, wouldn’t be blamed) for wondering how the heck jogging around a massive, featureless desert could possibly be fun, Funcom has actually done a great job of filling each region with shipwrecks to plunder, hidden caves and fortresses to blast your way through, and mountain ranges to climb. And while there’s plenty of empty space with nothing but unremarkable piles of sand to greet you, these spaces are actually used to great effect as obstacles keeping you from the next area, which must be navigated across quickly, lest you find yourself on the business end of a giant sand worm.

For example, early on you’ll be limited to a very small area that’s cut off from higher level areas that contain better loot and materials you need to craft better equipment. But crossing the massive distance of sand that stands between you on foot is a death sentence, as you’ll undoubtedly draw the attention of an angry worm in the process. To get to the other side, you’ll have to go through the steps of constructing your first vehicle, a small motorbike, then race across the gap as quickly as you can. This clever use of empty space brilliantly turns what I thought would be a weakness in the setting into a strength, and finding ways to cross a completely barren area with a Shai Hulud hot on your tail actually made up some of my favorite moments.

Similarly, the oppressive nature of the sun, which forces you to dart from shaded area to shaded area, turns the entire planet into a high stakes game of “the floor is lava” that can make otherwise uneventful jaunts from one place to another into an entertaining minigame. Refusing to take sun exposure seriously will drain you of ever-valuable water, wipe out your health, and kill you in pretty short order, which kept me on high alert, and since each region increases the heat level, you’re constantly having to invent new equipment back at your base to give yourself the best odds at survival. Sure, it can be a bit of a pain now and again when you hit the head and come back to find the sun’s shifted position and you’re now frying to death in the merciless heat, but hey, that’s just the price you pay for living on Arrakis, my friend, and I mostly enjoyed this little minigame that just made survival that much more tricky.

Of course, in addition to crossing arid deserts and dodging sunlight, you’ll be fighting off bands of bloodthirsty raiders and exploring forgotten places with a gun or sword in hand. The third-person gunplay isn’t groundbreaking by any means, as you’ll duck behind cover, toss grenades, and and return fire in pretty by-the-numbers encounters, but for an MMO with a massive number of players on the server, it’s still quite admirable that they managed to pull off gunplay that feels this snappy. And with a whole bunch of skill trees to pick from and build into – like the tricky and stealthy Mentats or expert survivalist Planetologists – there’s tons of ways to differentiate your character from the rest of your guild. As for myself, I focused most of my skill points into the tried-and-true soldier, which I expected might be a tad boring, but was pleasantly surprised to find myself very happy to be grapple-hooking around and tossing deadly gadgets to and fro.

Running and gunning with friends at your side is especially entertaining, and there were moments, like when my co-op partner used her Bene Gesserit skills to force an enemy to walk out into the open, then I threw a grenade to take them out, where combat really shines. There was also just the tiniest sampling of PvP in the beta build, focused on a couple crash sites that allowed for player-on-player violence, but due to server populations being fairly low in the closed beta, it was hard to get a sense for how this aspect will shake out. In any case, the vast majority of PvP hot zones are in the endgame areas I wasn’t allowed to progress to, so it seems we’ll probably have to wait for the full game to get a good feel on PvP anyway.

As a longtime fan of Dune, it also just feels so good to explore and learn more about a world that I’m quite fond of, and Funcom has clearly put a ton of effort into worldbuilding and lore, even despite taking quite a bit of creative liberty by placing Awakening within a parallel reality and canon than the books/movies. There are little details that have a massive impact on gameplay, like how incredibly valuable water is treated as the ultimate resource – you’ll drain blood from every fallen enemy, turn your own bodily fluids into water with a stillsuit, and take down bases just to pillage every drop of liquid gold they’ve got hidden away. And since water is required to make advanced materials used for crafting more higher level equipment, you’ll need to harvest and stockpile as much as you can, in addition to drinking it just to keep yourself alive. I won’t go into spoilers, but this kind of attention to detail touches just about every aspect of the world, including the factions and characters you meet along the way, which should be a treat for any fan of the setting.

If there’s anything to be concerned about with this otherwise thoroughly engaging beta, it’s the fact that I encountered a whole heap of bugs and performance issues during my time with it, which included everything from crashes to framerate dips, characters and objects getting stretched out bizarrely, and more. With the final version set to debut very soon, I was then pretty relieved when, in the middle of the beta, Funcom announced a month-long delay, presumably to address these issues. As always, it’s tough to gauge how much of this is cause for concern when betas are sorta designed to help highlight and patch these sorts of issues, but the sheer number of problems me and my friends encountered while playing was definitely cause for alarm with the launch date so near.