Dune: Awakening

Return to Arrakis

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Sometimes things happen really quickly. We had been commenting recently that, at some point, we wanted to give Dune Awakening another go. For me, it landed at exactly the wrong time… right before a Path of Exile league. One of the big turn-offs was the real-world upkeep aspect of the game, and the fact that I needed to log in periodically to refill the power packs on my base so that it would not deteriorate. All of that said, I had a lot of fun while I was playing it and learned a lot of things about the game itself that would make a restart feel so much better. Saturday night, after the podcast, I logged pretty quickly, and then when I got up Sunday morning to edit said podcast… I noticed a chain of messages in our games of the moment channel. Essentially, Tam had made good on the plans and reactivated our private server, and as such, Sunday morning after posting the show, I was back in the character creator building a new desert dweller.

This time around, I went with a Swordmaster and landed on a look that felt more “me”. While I generally play fairly lily-white characters in games, I can’t bring myself to do so in the Dune universe. It is just too unrealistic that anyone who has spent any amount of time in the desert would not have a lovely bronze complexion. I went Swordmaster because it has this bum rush type ability that seemed like it might be really useful early in the game. I was a Mentat previously, and the whole floating turret thing was cool, but felt like it took too much planning and setup for it to really be useful for very long. Swordmaster, on the other hand, has a ton of perks that improve how well you can survive in harsh conditions, which seemed like something I care way more about. Ironically, though I find myself using a rifle way more often than I am using a blade, because if I can keep things at ranged I can generally whittle them down pretty quickly. I desperately need a shield belt, though, so I need to stop stalling and do the quests that I believe unlock it.

One of the huge benefits of playing this already… is that I understand the flow of the early game a bit better. Nothing that I do in the first two zones is likely to have any permanence. I am already on base number three, and instead of building grand constructions… I am building essentially what is needed. I am also not too torn up about leaving resources behind, and carrying only the things that are actually more challenging to acquire, like the fremen materials. Right now, I have a small base situated vaguely between the Imperial Testing Station and the shipwreck, so that I can comfortably farm both of those. My first goal was to gather up enough blue materials to craft a Sandbike, because ultimately, I will need that to transition up into the next zone and start mining iron. I do want to finish doing the various contracts I have before moving upwards, though, because it is not like I am in an extreme rush. Thinking about Dune Awakening characters like Minecraft, or even ARPG characters, helps immensely because I know I will probably reroll again at some point in the future and wipe the slate clean again.

Another thing that I have noticed this time around is that I am way more willing to move around during the daytime. I think during my first playthrough, I was scared to death of being stranded out in the sun for any length of time, and as such, I spent too much time waiting for nightfall, where I felt like I could move around more freely. There are always shadows about, and you can get to the safety of them pretty quickly. It is highly unlikely that you will ever truly be stranded, and in a worst-case scenario, you build a temp base. I’ve even gotten way more comfortable crossing expanses of open desert during the day if I can figure out a way to hop between shadows. Daytime has become the time I farm resources that are easy to get, and Nighttime is when I set out on more serious adventures, like crossing between complexes of rock. When I play next, I plan on heading over to the ship wreck and farming some materials there, and maybe pushing past that to knock out the kill quest for the Trooper at the first city.

The highlight of yesterday was that I have my sandbike ready to roll, which is going to make finishing up everything that I want to do in Hagga South that much easier. Essentially, once I get ready to make the migration to the next area, I will load up some basic materials and then find a safe place to cross the gap. I really should have put in a proper two-wide door into this base instead of having to try to navigate my bike out of a normal door. It works for now, but is more fiddly than I would have liked it. Oh well, these are things that I can fix in the next base, because I know I will be starting over once again just around the corner. Essentailly I am building these 2×3 foundation block huts that have a second story. It gives me plenty of room to put a few power generators down on the bottom floor and all of the necessary machines on the top floor. They are not architectural marvels, but they are efficient… which feels like is way more important while you are still roaming around the map prior to getting your ornithopter. I know Tam already has a decent base in Aluminum territory, so once I get up there, I can rely on that somewhat. I think it will be important that we build bases in decent spots so that we can each utilize the other bases as a bit of a network.

The thing that I marvel at most about this game is its sound design. Moving around the desert feels amazing because you are constantly aware of the sounds and movement of the worms below you. Additionally, combat noises feel really good, and the ever-present threat of the Sardaukar at night keeps you on your toes. It feels like the world is the real enemy that you are fighting against, though, and it is living and breathing and always waiting for you to slip up. All of that said… I am starting to get to the point where I am willing to take more risks because the worst thing that can happen is that I have to start over. Progression goes much faster once you know what you are doing, so the idea of losing everything is no longer as daunting as it once was. Sure, there are some key progression moments… first sandbike, first dune buggy, first ornithopter… but those are also things that other players can help you with. I am sure if I got desperate, I could get someone to craft me Sandbike bits again.

The other big thing that I noticed is that it feels like the world has way more resources than it used to. Even the patch that just dropped seems to have added a bunch of nodes that were not there yesterday. For example, my current base did not really have much copper around it, but this morning when I logged in, there were four nodes in the same valley that I built the base in. Essentially, it seems like the game is way more forgiving than it was at launch, which only serves to make me willing to be a bit more reckless with resources. It felt like, at launch, I spent a lot more time struggling to reach a point of sustainability, and I am not having any of those issues now. So I am not sure if they eased up on how fast you lose water, but that definitely feels a bit easier than it was before. Maybe I just rushed my way to the stillsuit faster this time.

Essentially, I am enjoying my time back in Dune Awakening, and we will see how far I can get before Path of Exile 3.28 drops.

2025 in Review: The Games

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Good Morning Folks! After giving you updates on my life… it is time to roll on into the rest of my year in review topics. I legitimately do not know how many of these I have, but I have stalled long enough. This morning I am going to talk about the games that were important to me during the last year in either a good way or a bad way. This list is not going to look anything like most 2025 in review lists, because I do not play a ton of new games. I play an awful lot of ARPGs and treat each season as though it were a game launch. This wildly skews the sort of results that I have in this scenario. I am also this time sort of loosely grouping the list into less important to more important, but not necessarily a strict order.

Path of Exile II: The Last of the Druids

This is probably the most recent of the games I am going to talk about it, and I am still more or less playing it. On December 12th, Path of Exile II released a big update that launched the Last of the Druids and Fate of the Vaal league. In it they gave us access to the first of the Int/Str hybrid classes the Druid which has ascendancies for Shaman and Oracle. More important than that, they gave us access to the primal ability tree and the talisman weapon that allow us to turn into a Bear, Wolf, or Wyvern. I’ve been deeply critical of Path of Exile II up until this point, seeing it as a bit of a mechanically worse version of Path of Exile that just happens to have better graphics and a better user interface. Playing Bear Druid, and specifically Demon Bear Shaman is what really pushed me over the edge to truly enjoying this game. It is fun as heck to hop around the map causing big explosions with my fat bear ass. The game still has problems… and will continue to have problems for a very long time… but this gameplay got me hooked.

Slormancer

Slormancer is a little 2D sorta isometric view roguelike arpglike game that is a heck of a lot of fun. I did not play this game anywhere near as much as I should have, but I hope to remedy that in 2026. I did play it enough however to want to talk about it. The mechanics of this game are just really fun, and it reminds me of what if you took Rogue Legacy and turned it into an ARPG. I mostly played the knight character, but the archer was pretty fun as well. This really wants to be played with a controller though, and is ideal for television gaming. Once I get off my ass and figure out what I want to use as a proper Steam in the Livingroom setup, I will probably be playing more of this. If you have not checked it out and like any of the types of games that I eluded to in this post… check it out. It’s a heck of a lot of fun for $20.

Dune Awakening

I have such wildly mixed feelings about Dune Awakening. This is going to be a game that goes in my disappointments of the year pile. The AggroChat folks and friends decided to play together on a private server that Tam rented for us as we all got started, and I feel like that is the correct way to play this game. It is unfortunate that it requires someone shelling out for a server, and it is even more unfortunate that it does not grant you private access to the shared open world pvp deep desert. What killed this game for me though… was upkeep. You are required to play a certain amount of this per week in order to generate enough fuel to keep the shield on your base active, or your base slowly disintegrates over time. This feels really fucking bad. Namely because I got busy with various events while playing this game… and then had the death of a spouse which knocked me even further out of whack with ever getting back in. Once I lost everything, there was no point in me going back. I would love to see a pure PVE sandbox version of this game that allows you to set custom rules on a server by server basis for things like upkeep. The game itself has gone from a peak concurrency of not quite 200k players to an average of 8k…. so I think maybe it did not work quite right for a lot of players.

Hellclock

So what if I told you there was a game… loosely based on the real world events surrounding Brazil’s War of Canudos… that took place in the aftermath of the abolishment of slavery, but also somehow involves exploring dungeons and killing zombies and shit? Hellclock is a deeply odd and stylistic roguelike ARPG where you have a fixed amount of time to explore on each run, and once you run out of time everything winds back and you get to keep any powerups that you purchased during the previous run. The cyclical nature of the game is deeply satisfying and you get various tools to extend your runs as you get better. I did not play anywhere near enough of this game but again I think it is prime fodder for once I sort out my Steam in the Livingroom setup. I have to solve my wireless network woes before I really do that unfortunately because I have my old gaming rig hooked up in the livingroom, the connectivity speeds are complete ass. I’ve also not really figured out a good keyboard and mouse option, and there will be games that I don’t necessarily want to play with a controller. Anyways NONE of that is about Hellclock, which is just a universally interesting game.

Titan’s Quest II

Titan’s Quest II had quite a number of updates throughout the year and I spent several days really getting into the game and checking out what it had to offer. I landed on the decision that I do not really enjoy playing a melee class in the game, but dig the heck out of playing ranged. I played a sort of icicle archer thing that worked really well, and honestly the game itself is just gorgeous. The fights are pretty interesting, and this is very much a worthy successor to the first game, which in itself was a worthy successor to Diablo II. If you like ARPGs in general or you were ever a fan of TItan’s Quest, then I suggest checking it out. They are continuing to release updates for the game as it is still in development so if you would rather play it once it is finished, then this might be a game to put a pin in and check back when the 1.0 release finally happens.

Abyssus

This game is a heck of a lot of fun to play with a friend, and Ace and I spent a bit of time playing this game and should probably at some point return to it. I think Destiny Rising more or less stole the place in our gaming lives that this took up for a bit. Essentially Abyssus is a wave based arena shooter rogue-like… about exploring the depths of an underwater dungeon. You and your friends take on waves of monsters, get loot, and work your way down to fixed boss fights at specific floors. The deeper you go the harder it gets and the more varied the environments become. Big Nautical-punk vibes with this game because you are both wearing these diving suits while you wield your big damned guns and kill things. The further you go the more points you get to configure your build and control your weapon load-outs, but a lot of options unlock symmetrically as you reach certain floors giving you a mix of guaranteed upgrades and choice based upgrades. I am not sure this game would be fun solo, but it was a blast with someone hanging out on voice chat.

Path of Exile – Mercenaries of Trarthus

Mercenaries of Trarthus was a challenge league that ran in Path of Exile from June 13th to October 27th and represented the first new content we had gotten in almost a year since the launch of Settlers of Kalguur the previous year. First it was just amazing to get some new content in the game, but more than that it introduced Mercenaries and I have always loved those sorts of mechanics in ARPGs. One of my favorite aspects of Diablo III was building out my companion to buff the things that were weak in my build, and that is largely what players did in order to make some truly busted builds. The real meta of the league was doing some sort of build that could apply large amounts of Lightning damage, and then using Doryani’s Prototype on your mercenary, to debuff all of the mobs in your presence to have large amounts of negative lighting resistance. I think the build that I ran as my second in the league managed to get close to -300% Lightning Resistance while dealing a ton of damage with Storm Brand of Indecision. It was thoroughly busted but lord did I have a lot of fun playing this league.

Monster Hunter Wilds

There will be some of you who do not remember just how much I got into Monster Hunter World when it released in 2018 both on the original PS4 release, and later when it came out on PC in August of that same year. I had never really mainlined a Monster Hunter game despite trying to dabble in them on the mobile platforms, but this game sucked me in and stole so much of my time. Monster Hunter Wilds was a return to the same style of game as Worlds and when it launched I had a heck of a lot of fun playing it. Sadly I did not really stick around as much as I thought I might, but that does not discount the fact that I had an awful lot of fun playing it. I probably would have played it more but every time Ammo, Sita and I tried to group up I started having network problems. Capcom… has some of the shittiest grouping systems ever, and if they got someone from a western live service game to come unfuck their game interface… I think folks would be around far longer. I only put in around 60 hours, but it was 60 hours well spent.

Last Epoch – Beneath Ancient Skies

On August 21st Last Epoch dropped a pretty signfiicant update with Beneath Ancient Skies which added a whole new chapter to the game and a new league mechanic hunting down primal monsters and chosing to evolve them making them more difficult and rewarding. I had a really fun league with this game, but ultimately I burned through it pretty quickly. I played a Fire Minions Necromancer build and then ultimately hopped on the Thorns damage train for quite possibly the stupidest build I have ever played in any game where I am just nuking the entire screen with thorns damage. The new act was a lot of fun and it is probably the best content they have added into the game to date. The primal league mechanic was also a lot of fun, and each time this game expands it keeps getting better. I think the challenge for me is that I “finish” with the game way faster than I do with Path of Exile. I reach a point with my builds where I have seen everything that I really want to see and really pushing to the true pinnacle content of the game requires more hours than I really want to dump into it. That is not a failing of the game and more a case that it still needs more years to cook before it will be as rich of an experience as Path of Exile has.

Path of Exile – Legacy of Phrecia Event

Earlier when I talked about Mercenaries of Trarthus, part of the reason why that league was so damned much fun is that it had been a literal year since we last got a new league in the game. So much of GGG’s time was being devoted to the care and feeding of the fledgling Path of Exile II, that the POE core felt ignored. That is not to say things were not happening, we had a few fun private leagues like the Pohx League event, but there was one thing that probably took the cake. Almost as a shadow drop, Grinding Gear Games gave us the Legacy of Phrecia alternative ruleset event where every single one of the 19 Ascendancy classe were replaced. It was wild to play through this and I played a Righteous Fire Scavenger… which is the alternative version of the Scion. It was so much fun, and now this game mode exists as an alternate ruleset that you can use to create custom leagues. There is part of me though that wishes at some point all of the Phrecia ascendancies go core and become just alternate options allowing us 38 different ascendancy choices in the game.

Destiny Rising

Destiny Rising is essentially my game of the year…. but it does not get the top slot for reasons I will talk about later. This is a gacha game from Net Ease that remixes the tried and true Destiny format, but also makes it a heck of a lot more enjoyable in the process. There is no reason why I should be loving a Gacha game as much as I am, because I thought Genshin Impact broke me of that. However… Destiny Rising is shockingly fair when it comes to its Gacha mechanics. I have 3 accounts, 2 of which I have spent zero money on… and they both feel like I have plenty of things to do without having spent a dime. The whole three acccouints thing is largely because I am trying to maintain a guild when there are really only two or three of us that are actively playing. That is a whole other discussion. If you ever loved Destiny at any point in the past, you owe it to yourself to check out Destiny Rising. It is so damned much fun and really streamlines what made that game great. If you DO end up playing… hit me up because we certainly can use some more active players in our guild to do dailies.

Guild Wars 2 Fractal Incursion Event

My “Game of the Year” really goes to more specifically an event of the year. In September, Guild Wars 2 shadow dropped an event called the Fractal Incursion. This added a new feature to the game which allowed you to randomly queue for Fractals, giving the game what it needed so badly… a more modern group finder. Not only did they do this… they bribed the fuck out of us to run tons of them by providing a path to a piece of legendary armor, and also giving you a pathway to get said armor for every single weight class in the game. The end result was that Lion’s Arch specifically around the Mists portal was busier than at any point I have ever seen in this game’s history. The above screenshot was taken one morning when I was working on my blog post… so completely off peak hours for either EU or NA and it was STILL packed. Better yet we are going to be getting a version of this same group finder for a combined version of Raids and Strikes later this year. This has breathed so much new life into Guild Wars 2, and prompted us to have some really fun Thursday night fractal groups as we all chain ran them trying to get through the achievements. Absolutely the highlight of my gaming year, and on the 13th I believe we are getting a return of the Fractal Rush event so looking forward to that as well.

Those were my games and gaming events of the year. I am sure it looks pretty different than the lists for most people. I did not really play much in the way of single player experiences this year. I hope to remedy that in 2026, but who knows where that will go. My happy place tends to be listening to an audiobook while plugging away at a mechanically interesting but narratively devoid experience. Even for this coming year my games list will be the games that I played, not necessarily the games that came out so at some point when I finally do get around to beating Clair Obscur it will probably make a list. Anyways. Were there any unusual games that made your personal Games of the Year list? Drop me a line below.

Holding For Trarthus

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Good Morning Folks. I have an affliction… and it is Path of Exile league start fever. This is how you know I am a mess and fully bought into whatever nonsense Grinding Gear Games is selling, because right before the launch of a new league I get into this pattern where nothing quite works. I’ve never been one to test builds out ahead of a league start… but lord I am pretty close to this level of madness. I am still spending quite a bit of time poking around in Dune, and had a few close calls yesterday crossing the desert between the first area and the second area. I went back south to pick up the remaining intel that I missed, and when I was about to make the run across the gap a worm popped right in front of me forcing me to turn back around immediately. Then after that cleared I made another run at it, and then had a worm pop shortly after I got to the other side.

There is just enough friction that I find I have ground to a halt. The resources that I need… I cannot get, because I am once again deadlocked by the main story quest. However I have apparently not explored enough of the second area to even be able to see where I need to go. Traversal in the second area is just frustrating enough… that I find myself logging in, mining some easy resources… and then logging right back out. Essentially in the second area the biggest problem that I am having, is the increased presence of the Sardaukar. They made my life miserable when I first entered the zone at night, and I wound up getting chain frozen by their stun beams and burning through all of my bandages. This has scarred me a bit and has made me super hesitant to tangle with them again.

There is also just more ground to cover, and it is way more open… meaning that not only do you have to dodge worms, but also Sarduakar at night, and quicksand and drumsand the rest of the game. What I feel like I need is a Stilltent, which exists in the game, but is apparently not unlocked until much further down the tech tree path. Sandstorms are still terrifying and they seem to be of much higher magnitude than they were in the starter area. I am back to questioning if I am enjoying myself enough to deal with the frustrations to claw out of the hole that I am currently in. Tam has a base to the north and in theory I could make a run for it and then attempt to survey more of the area which will hopefully uncover where my next story quest is at. However when I have the time to play… lately I have just been playing more Guild Wars 2.

Side note… my Bi Pride wings have brought me way more joy than I thought they would. I ended up buying a proper game license for my second account during the recent massive sale, in part just so I could claim a set of the wings. I am not necessarily deeply engaged in Guild Wars 2 at the moment, but I am logging in every night just to make sure I am keeping my daily quests farmed down. I’ve bought the Legendary Weapon Kit, all of the Mystic Clovers, all of the Mystic Coins, and am now buying all of the cheap gold sacks and once I have finished with that I will probably pick up the last few items of cosmetic gear from the set that started last season. I’ve knocked out most of the weekly quests and hopefully Thursday we can do some of the Fractals and knock those out as well.

In a move that completely shocked me… I played some Path of Exile II last night. I started up a Crossbow Warrior with the intent of going down the path of trying the Warbringer Armor Explosion build. There was a build showcase three months ago circling around using the Warbringer armor break tech to cause screen wide explosions with a crossbow. It was one of those things that I kicked around the notion of starting, but never actually did. Since I appear to be in a Path of Exile mindset right now, rather than wasting my mojo in the real game… I figured I would pop into the sequel because playing any amount of that… is going to make playing POE1 feel amazing. All in all the leveling has been pretty smooth and I knocked out the first act last night. I would like to push this far enough to get to the point where the tech comes online and I can see how well it works.

However I am very much in this mindset of everything I am doing being very shallow and temporary. Goratha posted a build guide behind the Rolling Magma Mines concept which is worth checking out if you are interested in such nonsense. Right now at this moment I plan on doing a slams start and moving into Righteous Fire Chieftain when I can bring that online early in Act 2. I know that is the boring option… but also it is the predictable option and I know how to get it up and running and farming currency to do other things. There are a lot of builds that interest me, and I cleared out a bunch of available character slots last night so that I can create some of these fringe builds that interest me. I would rather do that from a stable place once I have unlocked my atlas and generated some currency, rather than trying to figure something out… getting frustrated… and then rolling a RF character later.

Dune Awakening Thoughts

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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.