Who even needs an ornithopter?
I’ve been living on a beta version of Dune: Awakening’s Arrakis for the last couple weeks, and despite the game being just over a month away from launch, there were some pretty big limitations on how much I could settle into desert life. Only low-level crafting was available, and just three of the first map’s dozen areas were accessible.
There was still enough to keep me busy for about 25 hours, but I couldn’t do the stuff I really wanted to do in Dune, like visit Arakeen, meet Duke Leto, and most of all, pilot my own ornithopter, something I’ve been looking forward to since the survival MMO was first announced.
I got over it pretty quickly, though, when I realized I already had the perfect vehicle for getting around the rocky cliffs and towering spires of Arrakis: my own body. Sure, I was weak and frail and about five minutes from dying of dehydration, but I could climb sheer cliffs like a squirrel climbs trees—and that was just the beginning.
Climbing in Dune: Awakening is a holdover from Funcom’s other sandy sandbox, Conan Exiles, which also has a climbing system (though I haven’t played it since very early access so I don’t know if it’s quite this extensive). You can climb anything in Dune: Awakening. Anything! Latch onto the side of a sheer cliff with the space bar and press W, and your character will begin shimmying up the wall.
You can’t climb infinitely: your stamina drains slowly as you climb, and then a second stamina bar appears that drains rapidly, as if your fingertips have begun to tremble and you’re about out of strength. Then you fall. But if you let go before you’re completely out of stamina, you can plummet toward the ground and then grab onto the ledge again, no matter how far you’ve fallen. There’s no fall damage if you don’t hit the ground. Those are some strong fingertips, baby!
It makes exploring a blast with very little downside for taking crazy risks.
It’s pretty ridiculous, but I don’t care: it makes exploring a blast with very little downside for taking crazy risks. I climbed and clambered and leapt and fell all over the map, and while I did get hurt a few times by mis-timing a few jumps or running out of stamina, I never once died from a fall.
I don’t think there’s anything in the game I tried to climb but couldn’t. Rocky cliffs, whether or not they look climbable, are. I kept getting shot trying to invade one NPC base high up on a spire, so instead of charging up the stairs I climbed the entire spire from the back, then dropped in from behind them. (They still shot me.) I climbed over player-built bases that were in my way. There’s a huge trading station with sheer concrete walls, like a windowless skyscraper jutting up from the desert. I climbed that, too. Piece of cake.
Throw in the grappling hook that comes along with the trooper class (don’t worry, every other class can get it too by visiting a trainer at the very start of the game), and you can fire it at a rock wall, pull yourself through the air, go sailing twice as high as the grapple point, then grab onto the rock wall and start climbing. It’s like being Spider-Man, if Spider-Man was constantly almost dying of thirst.
But wait, there’s more! Higher up the crafting tech tree, and sometimes even findable in loot as schematics, there are suspensors you can slot into your inventory to add a little hovering into your repertoire.
Put all those things together and you can grapple a distant rock, yoink yourself through the air until you’re 20 feet above it, and engage your suspensor so you just keep rising like a lazy pop fly in a summer softball game.
As soon as your upward momentum ends, just grab the wall. Congrats, you’ve just climbed about 100 feet straight up without even lifting a single finger. Those suspensors are great for quickly getting down, too: as long as your suit’s power supply holds out, you can float down to the ground from high above without even stubbing your toe.
It’s a ton of fun and makes navigating the rocks and spires a good time, even though it can get a bit janky. Space bar is grab but it’s also jump, so I would pretty regularly try to jump on my speeder bike and wind up climbing it instead of actually mounting it, which is panic-inducing when a sandworm is after you. I stuck to a lot of doorways and archways as I was trying to jump through them, too.
But I’m fine with a little awkwardness, and accidentally getting stuck to a ceiling from time to time, if it means the world is super friendly to explore. Even without a ‘thopter, I could still get myself to the top of the world.
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