Funcom’s upcoming open-world survival MMO, Dune: Awakening, aims to provide a unique social sandbox and an immersive individual character story on a massive scale. During the recent GDC presentation, the developers gave an in-depth view of the game’s opening hours, player progression, and social cooperation in Arrakis.
As soon as you customize and select your player character and background, you will find yourself in the dangerous world of Arrakis. A main story campaign will help you progress, but you will start in a tutorial zone that will introduce you to the various survival, crafting, and traversal elements brought over from Conan Exiles. This will familiarize you with the tools and materials necessary to survive the open desert.
Once you venture out into the open desert, you will encounter heat and sandworms, which are ever-present environmental hazards. It is highly recommended that you find a shaded and elevated space quickly. Taking in heat causes exhaustion, so finding dewy plants to recover thirst should be your primary goal. From there, you can salvage materials using the cutter ray to identify structural weaknesses for deconstructing, similar to Hardspace: Shipbreaker.
As you progress further, Dune: Awakening introduces a stillsuit with passive suspending abilities to navigate the verticality and free-form climbing quickly. A combat scenario unfolds with an NPC base invasion, and you quickly learn how the different classes can approach a situation. A trooper is a more direct engagement, whereas a mentat will be able to scan an environment and deploy a hunter seeker to one-shot enemies, provided they are moving.
Another feature called exsanguination allows the player to pull blood from defeated enemies and immediately replenish their water levels at the cost of a health debuff, or take it back to the base for purifying. These moment-to-moment survival choices reinforce the short-term gains versus the long-term reward that you will face often in Dune: Awakening.
Now let’s talk about the player bases and teaming up with others. Player bases are set up with a land claim and built through a totem system, which is similar to the system used in Conan Exiles. You’ll be taxed, of course. A hologram acts as a placeholder and allows friends to contribute their resources in base building, encouraging cooperative group play. You can save a copy of your base and place it anywhere in the world. Crafting machines can be placed at a base to refine materials and craft vehicles such as a sandbike. Schematics can be found throughout the world and can be sold in the world economy for a high price.
Emergent world events like a crashed spaceship offer opportunities to collect unique resources with friends, and a day and night cycle presents different challenges with patrols monitoring the area. In Dune: Awakening, player hubs serve as a social space for all the MMO interactions – trainers, merchants, guilds, factions, and meeting others from other connected servers. Building your skill tree will be crucial to success as you head into the game’s dungeons or Eco Labs. Characters will have three active abilities and three techniques. Once you prepare your build, going into an Eco Lab underground vault provides a different space from the open desert to explore strategic combat combinations with other players.
Finally, we end the presentation with a Spice Hunt. Spice Blows can be collected with a transport onocopter and sandcrawler. There’s a risk-reward as other players or environmental hazards like a sandstorm will roll in. Being true to the world of Dune, Funcom has been working closely with the Herbert Estate and Legendary to ensure the rules, world-building, and lore are appropriately represented in the game. One example is the purple color of spice and how an agreement was reached to have a more appealing visual marker.
Dune: Awakening is shaping up to be a massive MMO by all counts. Everything that was shown illustrates a deep connection to the source material, and the game’s realization as an open-world survival sandbox is impressive. There’s plenty for players to dive into and specialize with different classes, builds, and strategies, as well as creative freedoms with its social cooperation and base-building features. It’s an ambitious, large-scale project that takes the learnings from Funcom’s past titles, and has me excited to see more in the coming months.
