Dune: Awakening promises us a breath of fresh air, skipping early access for a full launch with no monthly subscription in May

Dune: Awakening is only a couple months away from release, and its dev team just gave us a few new reasons to get excited, including a promise of free updates and no monthly subscription. This weekend, Funcom posted a video on Steam sharing more details on Dune: Awakening, which will open for pre-orders on Monday.

Joel Bylos, Dune: Awakening Creative Director, outlined the highlights, stating, “The key things that you need to know about Dune: Awakening’s launch are that it will not launch in early access and it will not have a monthly subscription. It will receive regular free updates, including new content, new features, and quality-of-life improvements.”

We’ll see how the release goes, but the promise is that when Dune: Awakening finally awakens on May 20th, it will be a complete game at launch⁠—what a novel idea. While developer Funcom will release paid DLCs, available individually or in a season pass, those will all be optional, meaning players won’t hit a paywall before finishing the main story.

The skipping of an early access phase sets Awakening apart from other survival games, but it’s also billed itself as an MMO, which makes forgoing a monthly subscription almost as surprising.

The current Steam page for Dune: Awakening gives us a hint at the game’s price, as well, advertising pre-orders starting at $49.99. That’s refreshingly tame in an age of PC games launching at $60 or $70, maybe with a “Digital Deluxe Edition” that forces us to pay extra for core content, like the infamous Jabba the Hutt mission in Star Wars Outlaws.

In addition to Dune: Awakening’s business model and DLC plans, Funcom also unveiled the minimum and recommended system requirements:

Minimum

• Windows 10 or newer
• Intel Core i5-7400 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) or AMD Radeon 5600XT (6GB)
• 16MB of RAM*
• 60GB of storage

*This is as written on Awakening’s Steam store page at the time of writing, but is literally impossible. Unless it’s the best-optimized game that has or will ever be made, assume 16GB of RAM.

Recommended

• Windows 10 or newer
• Intel Core i7-10700K or AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 (8GB) or AMD Radeon 6700XT (12GB)
• 16GB of RAM
• 75GB of storage.
• If you’re not sure if

If you’re not sure your PC will be able to handle the game, or you’re just curious about your system’s performance, there’s currently a free demo available on Steam with the character creator and benchmark mode.

Dune: Awakening already impressed us in early previews, where its unique approach to the survival genre was on display. PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens praised Awakening for how it balanced survival mechanics with exploration and combat, noting, “Even in my brief time with the game, my increases in power felt steady and meaningful. By the end, when I was whipping across the desert on a sandbike and headshotting enemies with an Atreides rifle, I felt like Lisan al Gaib himself.”