Showing posts with label Dune Awakening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dune Awakening. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Dune Awakening Impressions: Bugs, Griefing, and Surprisingly Fun Moments

Dune Awakening image
 

 As I recently posted about, I jumped into Dune Awakening and have been playing with friends. Playing with friends was a different, and better, experience than what I encountered during the closed beta testing periods when I played mostly solo. Now that I have over a hundred hours logged with the launch version of the game, I wanted to share what I really think of Dune Awakening.

 First, I want to address the question of whether Dune Awakening is an MMO. My normal benchmark for an MMORPG is an open world that supports 1000+ players, which Dune doesn't get close to as it only supports 60 players in a "sietch" (aka subserver) and 300 in a deep desert (DD) instance (the DD being the end game zone). So while not exactly fitting my benchmark, I can bend to call Dune a "survival MMO" because the devs did lift the restriction on traveling between and building on different sietches, so in theory all players on a server, which each have a dozen or more sietches, can cross paths.

 With "is it an MMO?" out of the way, I want to make a statement: Dune Awakening isn't a good game. That doesn't mean it isn't a fun game to play at times and that I'm going to quit, but it is not a game that draws me back in, and if my friends aren't playing then chances are I'm not playing. The completionist in me will likely still work towards level 200 and finishing the various questlines, but at the same time, if something draws me away then no harm, no foul.

 Why isn't Dune a good game?

 The biggest glaring issue is the rampant bugs, exploits, hackers, and poor game design that leads directly to poor player interactions (aka griefing). As a veteran of the genre, I am used to bugs and exploits, but I've never seen a major dev studio developed MMO game so rampantly abused as I have seen with Funcom and Dune Awakening. Normally once you know what to avoid, you can go about and play your way, but in Dune there are so many issues that can impact you, and the sting of losing items can be very painful, that lots of players are posting their "I quit" moments publicly after they get hit by one. Personally, it keeps me from getting too invested.

 I don't blame players for quitting either. It is one thing to lose everything to the sandworm taking a risk to get a little extra spice. It is entirely different to lose everything to the sandworm because some jerk blocked your thopter into the ground so you couldn't take off before becoming worm food. In PvP areas there is an argument that you could fight back against this behavior, but when it happens in safe PvE areas you have no recourse. And that is just a player using "working as intended" game design to grief another player.

 It feels even worse when it is hackers and exploiters abusing permission systems or glitches to take control of your vehicles and bases, then wiping them out. Speed hacks, teleportation, item dupes, solari "gold" dupes, and more are never-ending. Hackers have been reported on our server for weeks with no seeming end in sight from the developers on either fixing the hacks/exploits or banning the cheaters. It really pisses me off to see the game in this state and makes me question the dev team. The only saving grace is that the game isn't a traditional MMO, so the impacts are localized vs becoming immediate widespread problems we see in MMOs with large servers.

 Not all of Dune is a bad game. The initial survival introduction to the game is fantastic. Everything from starting from scratch, gathering materials, and building your way to your first sandbike so you can finally make your way across the desert without getting eaten by the worm is top notch. There is genuine accomplishment to be had in escaping the worm for the first time. Even though I've repeated that part of the game several times between test periods and launch, I enjoy it each and every time.

 The problem is that experience doesn't last. Everything past that pales in comparison. In short order, most players will get their ornithopter and at that point never again touch a sandbike. There is an inside joke in the community that if you don't like "trucking" you don't like Dune Awakening, and there is a lot of truth to that statement. The mid and end game of Dune is all about the ornithopter, and most game time will be spent in that thopter flying from point A to B.

 With that said, I do enjoy flying a thopter and I do enjoy the speed at which it gets me from point A to B; I just wish I had to do less of it or had a reason to go back to my sandbike or other vehicles. The quests and contracts in the game are especially bad about having you go from A to B, often times simply to talk to the next person in line. There is a lot of fly, click on person, turn around, and fly back to click on person. I just hate this type of quest design in games.

 Another annoying aspect of the game is that no information is given to players about enemies or NPCs. No health bars, no names, nothing—that is unless you use your spice-induced state where the game then places tracking information over each enemy and player, but you can't use that all of the time. This would be fine if everything in the game was consistent, but it's not. There are literally a grand total of four enemy types you face throughout the entire game, and they all look the same and act the same. So when you have a quest to kill "the boss guy named Bob," it can be a frustrating experience of going through an entire area killing everyone hoping one of them is Bob. Chances are you won't figure it out and will just internet search the answer like the rest of us.

 The "no feedback" goes to quest items as well. I can't tell you how many times I was frustrated with a quest that said "find the document/crate/cache/stash/etc" and even after numerous passes through an area still couldn't find it, only to search YouTube for the answer to realize it's a nondescript crate in the corner that you passed by one hundred times but didn't get into the specific spot to realize it was the quest item. I get that there is a level of challenge this gives to the player and some players may like that; for me personally it just creates frustration.

 Frustrating players is something the game excels at in so many areas. Combat being one of the main offenders, and as I've said in so many of my posts about Dune Awakening, is one of its worst features. Combat sucks in this game. It's a buggy, desync-ridden mess of staggers and stunlocks. There are so many things about combat that just aren't fun.

 Melee combat is atrocious, and being in melee range is a death sentence if you at any point get stunlocked. At one point in a heated PvP fight, I got staggered into my parked ornithopter and I got stuck midair unable to respond. Of course I died, lost all of my inventory, and my thopter. It has been a long time since I faced such terrible combat.

 Ranged combat behaves better but is still a mess. Balance is probably the worst aspect, with sniper rifles and rocket launchers being so powerful that it is literally pointless to use other weapons. Sniper rifles will regularly 1-2 shot enemies, and in PvE most enemies won't even react to long-ranged shots. All while closer-ranged weapons take significantly longer and put you in far more danger because enemies will swarm and stagger/stunlock you because every time you fire your shield goes down. Then there is the rocket launcher that does 4x the damage of sniper rifles, and it is clear the bullet sponge end game PvE is assuming you brought a pile full of rockets to deal with it.

 And all of this fuss about combat is a moot point in the end game PvP because like the rest of the game it comes down to flying thopters around. Except instead of hauling cargo you are just hauling rockets and firing hundreds of them at other thopters. Fun initially but annoying before too long. All of that hard work to work towards end game armor and weapons just so you can die to a single rocket from a thopter the game never loaded onto your screen until it was too late.

 The end game overall is disappointing. The game culminates in players going to the deep desert (DD), which is a massive zone that can hold up to 300 players. Initially at launch this zone was a full PvP zone outside of the initial landing area. That went over poorly with players, and now half of it is PvE safe area and half of it is PvP. It is the only area where tier 6 materials drop and the spice blooms are significantly larger. If you want to progress to end game crafting, you must journey into the DD, and the vast majority of good areas will be in the PvP zones so you have to take some risks.

 You will be taking those risks in a thopter because there simply is no other option for traveling in the DD. It is a vast sea of desert full of sandworms. There are islands of rocks where players can land and find resources and secret caves, but they are few and far between. As I mentioned earlier, if you don't like truckin' you won't like Dune Awakening. You spend most of your time in the DD flying back and forth trying to find something to do. The DD is simply too large with too little to do.

 The size and low density of points of interest would be fine except for the fact that the DD wipes every week and reorganizes the map. It seems like a cool concept at first, but when you dig in further you realize this just means more truckin'. You can build bases in the DD, but that requires you to truck out materials and then pack it all up and truck it back out. If you don't, you lose it all when the DD wipes. RIP to any player that stepped away from the game and last logged off in the DD; they will log into a naked character.

 Ending up dead in the DD can also be a miserable experience if you don't have a massive DD base with tons of supplies to restock quickly. If your DD base has no supplies or spare thopters sitting around, you will be stuck. Again, the only vehicle that is of any use is a thopter, and you will be literally stuck on the rock your DD base is built on if you respawn there. Hope you have some friends that can give you a ride.

 The alternate option upon death in the DD is to respawn in Hagga Basin, which is the safe zone the main story and questing takes place in. Sadly, when you elect to respawn in Hagga Basin, you lose everything in your inventory and all armor/weapons/tools that you have equipped. You also end up spawning in a trading post and not your base. Since you respawned with nothing, you are literally stuck trying to figure out how to get back to your base. Maybe you built a base nearby the trading post and can walk there, or more likely you are in public chat begging for a ride.

 One insane game design fail to call out here is that the built-in "pay for a ride" thopter rides that you can buy a one-way trip from DO NOT let you pay from your bank account, so you must have the solari in your inventory to pay for a ride. Guess what—if you died, all of your inventory solari dropped! It is insane that you can't use your banked solari to pay for the ride. The fact this hasn't been changed gives me so little confidence in this dev team that they have any intent to respect my time.

 The DD is a missed opportunity. Hagga Basin in comparison is such a better zone than the DD, and it is a shame it is limited to 60 players compared to the 300 allowed in the DD zones. I'd rather have flip-flopped it and had 300 players in my Hagga Basin and only 60 in the DD (of course also shrink DD significantly). Or alternately, just get rid of DD and put the DD concept in Hagga Basin. Take a portion of the map and have it wipe weekly and put all of the Hagga Basin events into that zone. It'd be so much more enjoyable if all the events were closer together and it didn't take 20 minutes of thopter gliding to get to a spice bloom.

 Of course I am still playing the game and putting hours into truckin' around (literally—a recent play session of 5 hours I recorded myself spending 2.5 hours of that... 50% of my playtime... just gliding in a thopter). I do still get an adrenaline rush when my buddies and I have filled up our thopters with tier 6 materials in the PvP area of the DD and we take off to get back home with the valuable materials. I will admit I like being a bit of a jerk and jumping unsuspecting players with rocket launchers on my thopter (though I will admit I have yet to figure out how to actually secure kills in my thopter with rockets; I end up dead more often than not, losing my thopter and inventory). My crew is still working towards building a carrier so we can more quickly bring our mining buggy around Hagga Basin to collect materials to replace all the thopters we lose in the DD.

 I like some of the game loops in the game. I like playing with friends and working towards goals like our carrier. I just hate, hate, hate how much downtime is in between. Fix that and this game is in a better state. Combat will still suck though.

Note: this post was edited with the help of AI (Claude). The thoughts are my own.  The grammatical correctness and em dashes (—) are the AI.  

Friday, July 18, 2025

June 2025 In Review

June 2025 has come and gone; along with half of July!  Better late than never here is the look back at June.

The Blog

Blogger recorded visits for June: 61,663 (note: below graph includes some July dates and is missing June dates)

june 2025 blog stats

In other metrics:

  • Posts:
    • Target:  n/a (been unmotivated lately to blog so every post is a bonus in June)
    • Posted: 8
    • Difference: +8
  •  Search Trends
    • Search trends had a major shake up in June with searches for "ARC Raiders" taking over in the place of my longstanding top search topics of New World and Battlefield. Let's look at some of those ARC Raiders search strings:
      • "arc raiders news" - everyone wants news about this potential GotY contender launching in October!
      • "arc raiders countdown", "arc raiders shadow drop", "arc raiders timer" - a hidden countdown ended in disaster when ARC Raiders didn't surprise launch at the end of it.  We were all disappointed.

What I Played

I got back into New World for a bit in June working on my Season 8 pass.  Everytime I jump back into New World I get a little lump in my throat.  The game plays so well and the combat is so satisfying; it's a shame it's not more popular.

I also jumped into Dune Awakening after some friends started playing it.  I need to post more about my thoughts but for now I am just casually enjoying it with my friends because I know from my testing experience the end game is rubbish. 

Years Ago

1 Year Ago

As June 2025 has me playing survival MMO Dune Awakening it is worth mention that in June of 2024 I was addicted to another survival MMO: Once Human.

Let us not forget as well that June 2024 marked the start of the dark ages for New World Aeternum as the "big announcement" turned into a big fat nothing. Read more in my Dark Days for New World post.

5 Years Ago

June 2020 featured no blog posts.

10 Years Ago

May of 2015 marked my blog's 10 year anniversary!

15 Years Ago

June of 2010 marked my 10 year mark in the military.  Fast forward and I am now retired from the military!

I was also complaining about the "game that shall not be named: Counting the lies: Star Wars: The Old Republic "Hope" Trailer 

The gaming community got our first look at the OnLive service which at the time blew my mind that graphically demanding games were going to be able to be played on an iPad via a game streaming service like OnLive.  OnLive didn't end up lasting but the concept of streaming games still lives on even though its a small niche in the market. 

20 Years Ago

I started blogging in May of 2005 so June of 2005 was month two!  At the time I was hopelessly addicted to World of Wacraft and getting into organized group content.  Of course this means I got screwed out of a loot roll and complained about it.

World of Warcraft also brought us the first PvP battlegrounds: here were the basics as I saw them back then

I was also enjoying Battlefield 2 and playing the medic class.  A trend that started a long trend of me playing supporting/healing roles in many games following. 





 

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Dune Awakening Is Better With Friends — And I Wasn't Ready for That

I went ahead and bought Dune Awakening. Not because the game is setting Steam on fire or because influencers are fawning over it. Truth is, I play-tested Dune Awakening for a good stretch over the past year, and I walked away feeling… lukewarm. The survival systems felt grindy, solo play was a slog, and the world—while beautiful—felt empty.

Then my friends jumped in.
And with nothing better to do, I reinstalled the game, hopped on my sandbike, and joined them. What I discovered surprised me: Dune Awakening is way better with friends.

Dune Awakening screenshot of my character
Yet another heartlessgamer awakens

The Test Phase vs. The Real Thing

During testing, I mostly played solo. Any player interactions I had were random: impromptu squads tackling a challenge or strangers passing by. It was functional, but forgettable. The core systems—crafting, grinding, building—quickly became repetitive.

This time was different. 

My friends had already left the newbie zone behind and were holed up in a base far from the starting area. I zipped across the dunes to catch up, and what followed felt like an entirely new game.
 

Dune Awakening screenshot of my character on a sandbike with worm in background
Zipping to my friends base... and I better zip faster

Skip the Grind, Embrace the Game

When I arrived at their base, I was immediately drenched in generosity—literally showered (pun intended) with water, tools, weapons, and armor. Suddenly, I wasn’t scraping by for resources. I wasn’t stuck in the slog of early survival. I was on pace with my group, and for once, I could let them make the rookie mistakes and discoveries I had already been through in the tests.

It was… relaxing.
Dare I say, fun.

Movement Is King

If there’s one thing Dune Awakening nails, it’s freedom of movement. You can climb nearly any surface. Suspensor belts let you float. Grappling hooks (from the Trooper tree) open up vertical play. There are speed boosts, dashes, leaps—you name it.

If a direction exists, you can probably travel that way.

These traversal tools are normally locked behind hours of progression, but because I had friends, I skipped straight to the good stuff. 

Dune Awakening screenshot of my character on a sandbike
Watching your friend almost get eaten by Shai-Hulud (he just made it to safety)

 

The Ornithopter Express

Then came the ornithopter.

My group had already unlocked one (while I was still several hours away from myself), and they graciously let me borrow it. I even got to share how to carry a passenger by having them hop on top. Of course, that also meant I had the honor of teaching them the hard way what happens when your pilot sucks.

Dune made the smart choice to not gate being able to use vehicles behind your own progression. If it exists in the world you can most likely use it even if you can't craft it yourself.

Dune Awakening screenshot of an ornithopter
The game changes entirely once you have access to an ornithopter

Why It Works Now

With three of us working together, life on Arrakis is smooth sailing. There's always water at the base. Always a vehicle available. Always enough solari (the in-game gold) to get by. The punishing grind that wore me down before? Gone. Replaced by collaboration, shared goals, and just enough chaos to keep it fun.

The Final Word

Dune Awakening hasn’t suddenly become a perfect game. I still have my complaints. But I’m having actual fun, and that matters more than any patch note or feature list. It’s proof that even a game I once shelved can come roaring back to life—all it took was the right people beside me.

Lesson learned: survival is better with friends. Especially on Arrakis.

TL;DR:

If you're playing Dune Awakening solo and bouncing off it, try it with a crew. It just might change everything.

Note: this post was edited with the help of AI (ChatGPT). The thoughts and specifically in this post, the snarkiness, are my own.  The grammatical correctness is the AI. 

Friday, June 06, 2025

I'm not playing Dune Awakening (yet)

Dune Awakening

 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.

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Dune Awakening Gameplay

 We just got a 20+ minute long look at Dune Awakening's gameplay thanks to their video at Gamescom 2024.  This was the first time I've gotten to see the game in action.  Go ahead and watch the video and read on down below for some quick thoughts.

Thoughts:

  • The building UI was almost pixel exact to what I am used to in Once Human. Even further UI elements such as how interacting with an object seemed right from Once Human as well. Even the machines and workstations built inside the bases seemed very Once human.
    • I admittedly don't play a ton of games in this genre but are they all so scarily close in design and UI?
  • The combat and animations seemed to need work.  Character movement looked sluggish.
  • I like that the new trend in game seems to always give players a glider or jetpack.  Dune Awakening showed off its own flavor in the video and I'm on board!
  • The world events seemed cool.  The question is if they are random or if they occur at the same time in the same places.
  • I am not sure I was a fan of the over world top-down map for travel.  I will have to see how it plays but felt like it will take me out of the immersion of the game.
  • Each clip wasn't long enough to get a real sense of gameplay but enough was shown to see the game is well along in development.

 I walked away from the video interested in the game as a possibly more polished base builder survival exploration than what Once Human currently offers.  The game is not set to be out until some time in 2025 so I have time to watch it mature.  I'm signed up for testing so hope to get an early look and chance to provide feedback.