Dune Awakening, the new survival game pretending to also be an MMORPG, launched this week into early access. The Steam charts are peaking, YouTube videos are flooding in—and yet, here I am, not playing. Can I really call myself an MMORPG gamer?
First, I want to note that I was a long-time tester for Dune Awakening. I’ve already gotten into a squabble about "breaking the NDA" once, so I’ll be careful not to let any of my opinions here be influenced by those NDA test periods. Even mentioning I was in the tests is technically breaking NDA... but whatever—the game is live now. My comments will be based on the public tests and general community feedback so far.
To start, I’ll pull a quote from Belghast’s early access impressions:
"I am in this weird state of equilibrium with the game where I don’t love it and I don’t hate it."
That sums up my feelings as well. It's why I haven't rushed to get into early access or the standard launch (yet). I’ll keep adding “yet” because I’m not playing much else right now, and a new game—even one I don’t see long-term potential in—is tempting.
One area of concern is Dune Awakening’s server setup. Players share servers, but different areas have different restrictions and player caps. Depending on demand for your “slice” of the servers, you might be locked out of progress entirely if you can’t reconnect to the area where your base is located. Can I move servers? Can I move my base? These questions are flooding community sites. It’s more confusing than it needs to be.
All of this server weirdness cuts at the heart of what makes an MMO an MMO: exploration and organically running into other players. Dune Awakening feels less like an open world and more like loosely interconnected hubs. There were many times in the public tests where I didn’t encounter another player at all. Later in the game, players are drawn together more often—but server caps and restrictions still undercut any sense of “massive.”
Then came the announcement: players can buy private servers. I groaned. When you add that to the already limited planned server capacity—which, when you do the math, is below the number of players trying to get in so far—it just doesn’t feel great. I’ve never followed an MMORPG that sold private instances to its players. It’s a baffling design decision.
Some readers may remember I heaped praise on Once Human, a game very similar to Dune Awakening. Like Awakening, Once Human was also a quasi-MMO survival game. Once Human was buggy and janky, with a similarly questionable server strategy (caps, instances, planned end dates and relaunches). And yet, I loved Once Human during the time I played it. I can’t explain why the server stuff bothers me more in Dune Awakening. Maybe it’s because I expected more from Funcom than I did from the relatively unknown developers behind Once Human.
Another issue: the combat. As a Dune fan, the thing that always made Dune’s combat interesting was how shields rendered ranged weapons mostly ineffective. Melee mattered. In Dune Awakening, melee combat... isn’t great. They’ve made changes, they’ve talked it up—but based on launch day streams, it still doesn’t look good. Meanwhile, ranged weapons are overused, making the game feel more like a generic shooter than something rooted in Dune lore.
Speaking of lore—that’s another sticking point for me. I get that the game had to make choices, but water feels too easy to come by. One particular source—blood—is used far too frequently. In Dune lore, purifying blood into water is a rare, revered act. In the game, it’s something you do every few minutes. Again, I understand the design trade-offs, but it breaks immersion. That’s a me problem, I admit.
Even though it’s been several months since I played Once Human, I still feel worn out on survival games. The idea of harvesting rocks for the hundredth time just doesn’t excite me. Dune Awakening adds a twist—you have to trace a pattern on objects to break them open. Neat the first few times. Tedious after that.
There are UI quirks I don’t like, either. The crafting menus feel cluttered and unintuitive. There are eight usable item slots, which you have to mix weapons and utility items into. Eight is a lot—it requires finger stretching to make use of them all. And you need them all. Everything from sucking blood to summoning your vehicle takes up a slot. Many of these actions could’ve been bound to separate hotkeys. I’d prefer weapons were statically tied to 1/2/3 rather than needing to assign them manually.
That said, there are things to like. I expect we’ll see strong peak player numbers (it was already nearing 100k on day one of head start). The atmosphere can be phenomenal. The desert at night, with ships hovering overhead, oozes menace. Your first encounter with a sandworm won’t be forgotten—though your gear will be if the worm catches you. Players always surprise with creative buildings. And there’s PvP later in the game.
We’ll see what comes out of Summer Games Fest announcements tonight for ARC Raiders, and I’ll also weigh whether I want to engage more with New World Season 8 before making a final decision on Dune Awakening. Launch periods of MMORPGs—even quasi-MMOs like Dune here—are often the most memorable. If I’m going to play, it’ll be soon. But for now, I’m watching Dune from the sidelines.
Note: this post was edited with the help of AI (ChatGPT). The thoughts are my own. The grammatical correctness is the AI.
