Dune Awakening Thoughts

Good Morning Folks. This past Thursday dropped the head start for Dune Awakening, a Survival MMO set in the Dune Universe. Essentially this falls along the lines of something like Valheim but set in the Dune Universe, with really high quality environment graphics and an interesting twist to the story. This is a universe where Paul Atreides was never born and Duke Leto Atreides was never successfully assassinated leading to the downfall of that house. The Fremen were wiped out by the Sardaukar in a mass genocide… and the planet of Arakkis is actively in play with the Harkonnens, Atreides, and other minor houses of the Landsraad vying for control. You can choose to join forces with either Great House, or carve out your own path in between them pitting each against the other. At least that is the pitch for the game… and I can neither verify nor disprove any of it… because I am not terribly far in the overall progression of the game. At this very moment I am level 24 and barely progressed in the main story… because I am prone to fits of being a murder hobo and ignoring quest chains.

I saw some early advice that greatly tweaked my initial plans with the game. Namely that it was very easy to specialize in Trooper because there is an NPC trainer at the first town… but much harder to subclass in other things. I had read that Mentat was a really solid early start because you got access to the very powerful turret ability, and I leaned on this heavily during the early game. Combat is rather challenging at least until you get some decent weapons and gear under your belt, and a lot of my early experiences were me sneaking into a camp… deploying my turret which would fire off 3-4 shots before exploding but was highly capable of dispatching the few scavengers that were in each camp. From there I would mop up whatever was left off… drain all of the corpses of their precious precious moisture and then loot whatever I could and rush back to base to dump it into storage.

You can build up to two bases at a time, and very early you will probably end up creating a box like I did that only served as enough of a base to get you in out of the weather and protect you from the real dangers of Arakkis… the Sun and the Sandstorms. The game does something really interesting in that when you have to abandon a base… it still exists in the world and any other player can claim it by plunking down one of the control beacons. Additionally all of the stuff that you had in your base sticks around in the same way that you left it, and you can trek back to loot it later… but relinquishing control of a base essentially opens up all of that stuff for free for all looting. This has to be really interesting on a public server because I fully expect the entire zone to be littered with little hidey holes created by players… full of random smatterings of loot.

That is the first part of why this experience has been so enjoyable. I am not playing on a public server. Funcom in their infinite wisdom opened the game up so that third party server providers could sell private servers that players could rent. Tam opted to rent a server for the AggroChat crew to play on, which allowed us to play from Thursday all the way through the weekend without a single connection issue. I heard in passing that there were some significant lag and connection problems playing on the public servers, but for us… everything was calm and peachy and allowed for an interesting leveling experience as we could pool resources and share bases. Right now there are just two of us playing on the server, but I believe there will be another batch joining us when the game officially launches for everyone that did not pay the early access tax on Tuesday. You can also see that I tried to lean into the whole Mentat thing with my character appearance.

There are essentially three vectors of progression in the game that I have seen thusfar. The first being your character level and spending skill points in the trees that are available to you. Essentially a build is a combination of points spent, three active abilities, and three passive buffs called techniques. I do not know when my third active ability unlocks but right now I am running my ever faithful turret from Mentat, and the Shigawire Claw from Trooper that allows me to rapidly ascend cliff faces and honestly fly around the battlefield if I need to. When combined with a suspensor belt that allows me to float slightly or more often fall gracefully… I can mimic flight for short periods of time. I’ve unlocked the Trooper class tree and have spent points related to gunplay there and reduced weapon durability loss. Through a quest chain I also gained access to the Planetologist tree which has a Mechanic branch that makes it so that I use less fuel and my sandtrike takes less wear and tear.

A slightly more important progression system is the tech tree gained through researching. Roaming around the map and uncovering new areas, and scouting camps and bandit settlements rewards a currency known as Intel. You can then turn around and spend that Intel researching various patterns that you can then craft. This is going to be a significant hurdle in your progression because not only do you need to research the crafting machines, but you will need to research individual patterns. For example I am not currently using the most efficient mining laser, because I have prioritized combat resources above it… and at some point in the future when I am flush with Intel I might upgrade it for efficiency… or will become a higher priority when I actually need to harvest carbon. Early on it is pretty easy to research everything… but now that I am in the second region of the game I am having to pick and choose what I want to research. Were Tam and I actually doing this game efficiently… we probably should have tag teamed this and focused on different things so that we could have access to everything easily.

One thing that is a bit interesting is the inclusion of Unique patterns. These are essentially what good drops would be in any other game. You often get these from the chest at the end of more difficult content, and they grant you access to craft a single instance of the item. These are HIGHLY relevant items and are a power level that even in the second zone of the game I cannot quite hit by crafting normal items. I focused on crafting the Way of the Fallen Pistol and Kaleff’s Drinker Knife and they hard carried me through the first chunk of the game. The emperor’s wings gave me early access to the ability to float… well before I would be able to research that on my own, and the unique literjon is a massive upgrade given it comes with six pips worth of storage instead of the normal four. I got all of these items way earlier than the main story quest would have given them to me… because again… I have a tendency to go murder hobo and ignore the story. In truth I would absolutely do this again even though it led to me having to do certain chunks of content two or three times as a result.

The third and arguably most important vector of progression… is the main story quest. This is unfortunately where I have fallen down in this game, because generally speaking when you give me an open world experience… I don’t want to be chained to someone else’s timeline. If you look up at the research screenshot, there are a few items that have a lock icon on them. This is effectively locking progression behind some step in the story that you have not reached. I smarter person than I appear to be… would focus fire the story and churn through the progression steps to fully unlock the tech tree more quickly. Tam as a result is way further along in the progression than I am, because he has the proper mindset for this sort of game. Personally I feel like it would be a much BETTER game if you unlocked various tech trees when you first encounter the materials that are used for them. One of the things that I love about Path of Exile for example is that you can completely ignore the story and if you know what you are doing you can short cut all of the quest steps just by obtaining the final items required for them. I have an inventory full of items that I am certain will be used for quests later in the progression… but cannot really do anything with them for the moment because I went somewhere too early.

It admittedly took awhile before the game got into my blood. I think when I last spoke about it at the tail end of the week… I was neither a for or against it… but It has won me over. First off it is just really gorgeous and you have some truly haunting vistas like this guild heighliner floating impossibly silent above the world amidst all of these auroras at night. The true dangerous of the world of Dune are the sun which saps you of moisture, the sandstorms which shred bone… and will absolutely straight up kill you quickly if you are out in one when it happens, and the sandworms which will swallow you whole and cause you to lose everything that was on your body. Pretty much everything else is recoverable by running back to the sight of your death and picking up some of the random stuff that you dropped. I’ve not experienced it but apparently running over top of quicksand is another instant death with 100% loss of everything on you.

Technically I survived a sandstorm, but it involve me chain resurrecting myself… and then blowing through all of the bandages that I had crafted in order to just barely keep alive. I would not recommend it in the least. The game generally gives you one to two minutes of warning, and when you hear the automated voice… you better be booking it to some area that is showing up as “sheltered” or better. Otherwise you too will be doing the resurrection dance trying to stay alive until it blows over. Thankfully they seem to be fairly quickly moving… so you don’t have to stay sheltered for terribly long but so far… it is absolutely the thing I am the most terrified of. The sandworms themselves… seem to travel in patterns and if you just saw one pass then it is probably safe for you to venture forth towards that next rock outcropping. I think of Dune as an ocean game… with the sand being the water, and the rock outcroppings being the islands. Every step that I make… even now that I have transportation is about minimizing my time out in the open so I plot my moves carefully from island to island as I get to my final destination.

I spend a lot of time moving around at night, because at least then you are removing one of the risk vectors from the equation. I do a lot of short trips out to destinations and then ferry back my resources to my base. Essentially I am worried about carrying too much in the open for too long, and it also becomes very important for you to create a garage of sorts to store your vehicles in because if you leave them out during a sandstorm… they will essentially get disintegrated. I’ve not reached the point where I can begin to repair my gear which is extremely nice. However I also feel like I have fallen behind the tech tree as I moved into the second area. Tam has a base near mine that I absolutely used for a bit just because he had more machines available than I did. You can share out your base with your friends, and as a result it has been useful to sort of leap frog our way around the map. I just saw that Tam built a new base to the far north… so I might chose to build something in a different region just to give us more access to safe spots to hole up for awhile.

Is this game the best thing ever? Absolutely not. Am I enjoying myself? Very much so. It is a survival game, much like any other survival game with the added bonus of being Dune themed. If you are looking for the best possible version of this sort of game, I highly suggest checking out Enshrouded. For the moment I am having fun and I am interested to see where this adventure goes. I think I will essentially peter out when the next Path of Exile league drops at the end of the week, or if I high the Landsraad segment of the game…. because we are not a big enough guild to matter there. I kind of hate that the Deep Desert is shared between all of the private servers, and will still be PVP enabled. I was hoping that by renting a server we were skirting that functionality and could just have our big chill player versus environment game-play. Thing is… the environment really is terrifying at times… that was enough for me without having to deal with other players in the mix.

If you were ever a huge Dune nerd then this game is probably something you would want to check out. If you are also a big survival game fan, and have reached a point where some of the other offerings in this genre are stale for you personally… then again it might be worth a shot. However I do not think that this is revolutionary enough to really be a massive hit on its own right. I am not interested in the PVP and Guild Combat aspect of the game, because I am just not wired in that manner. If you are, then it might be a thing you care about far more than I do. I think it is a mid to interesting game experience that comes flavored in a science fiction universe that I care about… and for me personally that is an enjoyable offering. I do not think this is going to be a game that most people are going to care about however. Right now it is a strong six out of ten for me.

Are you playing Dune? What are your thoughts? Over the weekend I saw Scopique made his post like this… but I purposefully skipped reading it until I had written my own thoughts this morning. Now I will be heading over there to hear his experience.