August 2025 In Review

 August has come and gone and so has Blaugust 2025.  I didn't achieve what I wanted to achieve for Blaugust so let's take a look back at the August that was.

The Blog

Blogger recorded visits for July: 326,819

In other metrics:

• Posts:
  
• Target:  31 (to meet the Blaugust goal of once a day)
• Posted: 17
• Difference: -14
• I fell off the Blaugust horse early and never got back on it.  My Blaugust plans to talk about blogging and blogging platforms never materialized. I'll get a Blaugust recap out here in the next few days.
•  Search Trends
• Search trends changed in June and that trend continued in July:
• "battlefield secure boot" "secure boot required battlefield" - Secure Boot being required to play the Battlefield 6 beta was a hot topic and I shared my own experience in a post which netted the most Google clicks of any posts this month.
•  "deadlock invite pending" - this search skyrocketed around the time of the Deadlock update (which I posted about here).  Honestly surprised Valve has continued with the invite system for the open test; seems like at this point they'd be better off just letting anyone try that wants to.
• "arc raiders countdown" - this actually trended way, way down this month which is expected as we are at the midpoint between Tech Test 2 hype and the October release date for ARC Raiders. 
• In "things I observed in search console":
• Image searches for "minecraft mountain base" is my top result for images.  It's neat to see many years later that my Minecraft adventure from 2010 (15 years ago!) is hopefully inspiring new builders.  The post: Minecraft Mountain Base
• "bf2042 iwo jima" netted a small number of  visits which was nice to see as BF2042 enjoyed a resurgence in interest thanks to Battlefield 6.  The new Iwo Jima map has been a blast to play in 2042.

What I Played

 My friends and I have been sticking with Dune Awakening, but honestly, it’s pushing me to the edge of rage quitting more often than not. The combat is rough, and PvP ends up being a frustrating mess. Losing in PvP can set you back hours of progress, especially if your opponents decide to thumper your thopter — sending it to a worm and deleting it permanently.

 Normally, I wouldn’t mind setbacks like that, but the combat feels so bad that I never feel like I have a fair chance. Ground fights are plagued with stagger locks that stop you from dodging, activating skills, or even moving. Then you add in tactics like players gliding in silently on a thopter, pocketing it mid-air, and dropping right behind you… it just leaves you feeling powerless. More often than not, you have to resign yourself to being ganked repeatedly, even when you’re actively looking for a fight.

 So yes, I’m still begrudgingly playing Dune Awakening with my friends, but the PvP endgame just isn’t fun. There’s only so much building and gathering I can do to distract myself from that.

 Later in August, I jumped on the No Man’s Sky bandwagon after the Voyagers update. I’ve been really enjoying my early exploration of the galaxy. There’s something refreshing about a game with so many possibilities. The fact that I can take off in my ship from a planet, fly into space, head to another world, and never hit a loading screen still amazes me. Add in space stations, the anomaly, space pirates, and more than I can list, and it’s clear this game is going to steal a serious chunk of my gaming time. And I haven’t even touched on the multiplayer yet!

 On top of that, my sons and I have been continuing our Minecraft adventures. I need to get us set up on a realm, especially after we lost progress when a local save reset on us. It’s also tough that our current setup isn’t persistent, so if we’re not all playing at the same time, no one can move the world forward. A realm would solve most of that and make our sessions much smoother.

Years Ago

1 Year Ago

 August 2024 was a wonderful Blaugust experience and my wrap up can be read here.

 Also in August of 2024 we got a first look at Dune Awakening's gameplay.   It was clear in the video that combat wasn't going to be great and sure enough a year later and combat isn't great.  I guess it's a positive that the initial video look we got back then was what the actual game turned out to be.

 August of 2024 also brought us Deadlock's initial beta test.  This was the hottest game since sliced bread at the time.  A year later and the game has pretty much dropped in interest and is still in a test phase.  Player activity is down from hundreds of thousands peak players to just tens of thousands.  It's possible the game peaked before ever making it to release.

5 Years Ago

 In August of 2020 we were enjoying the Crowfall Beta. At the time I thought this was the next big game for me.  I was going to lose hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to it. Fast forward to today and Crowfall has already been shut down.  But the Crowfall Beta does hold a special place in my nonexistent heart because it was through the beta community that I found out about this other game called New World and little did I know at the time but New World would be the game where I lost thousands of hours (4,000+ and counting!).

10 Years Ago

 August of 2015 existed in the time of no blogging for me.

15 Years Ago

 August of 2010 was marked by my purchase of The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson.  15 years later and he has delivered five books in this amazing series!  Now if only George RR Martin could deliver at such a pace.

 Another interesting post and article to look back on was this one: MMO Developers: Read this, learn from it .  Now 15 years later I'd of expected more MMOs to have been developed around the single server design.  And while we have mega servers in many MMOs we really haven't gotten another single server MMO like EVE Online.

20 Years Ago

 In August of 2005 I was complaining about Alterac Valley in World of Warcraft and how it needed to be rebuilt.  I really miss those days.  Alterac Valley was such a fun experience at the time and I dearly miss those simpler days where I had hours and hours to devote to a singe map game mode and write such long winded change requests for it!

 Speaking of WoW battleground design suggestions I also suggested they should be cross server.  At the time it was a foreign thought to have cross server activities. Fast forward to modern MMOs and it's hearsay if they launch without cross server capabilities.  Oh how times change!

 I made a Battlefield 2 video and uploaded it to Google Video.  Sadly it's been lost to history at this point as I didn't opt to migrate it to YouTube.  Not even the Wayback Machine has a copy of the video even though it did archive the page at one point.  Another sign of "oh how times change"!  Note: it is possible I have a copy on my old hard drives sitting on the shelves; I just haven't spent the time to dig through them.

 

Some Random Friday Thoughts

 

Credit: ChatGPT generating an image to go with the blog post.

 It's been a tough work week and I've found myself juggling trying to play four different games: New World Aeternum, Dune Awakening, Battlefield 2042, and as of yesterday No Man's Sky.  On top of that I've gotten back to keeping on top of updates for other games: NASCAR 25, ARC Raiders, Battlefield 6, Ashes of Creation and Star Citizen to name a few.  And then my youngest son is starting into his first year of kid's activities of which I always volunteer.  All of that to say things are busy and blogging is on the bottom of the stack.  But it's Friday and I just have some thoughts to throw out there.

Magic the Gathering Arena

I tend to always catch various Magic the Gathering posts, specifically about Arena, on Reddit and get myself tangled up in the comments.  I really do miss playing this game but the financial commitment was something I couldn't keep up with (and it's even worse now with the pace of sets being released).  But I still miss it.  I still want to log in and cook up a deck or two; maybe throw down in Brawl (Arena's version of commander).  No action I am taking here; just sharing the thought out loud.

NASCAR

 I've gotten myself into NASCAR again lately.  I sort of take a pass at the sport once every five or so years.  I grew up in the Earnhardt days and still to this day find his legacy and story fascinating (seriously; I watched the recent Earnhardt documentary multiple times now).  The racing career of his son, Dale Earnhardt Jr, and now what Jr does to represent the sport is equally fascinating.  I have also always dabbled in racing games; more of the Wreckfests of the genre than NASCAR games but there is a promising NASCAR 25 game coming out this year from the iRacing devs that seems promising.  I am probably going all out for it with steering wheel and pedals.

ARC Raiders

 Holy freaking heck do I want this game to be here already.  That's all I wanted to share.

No Man's Sky

 I will likely have more posts on this but it is shaping up very nice to be a filler game for me between now and ARC Raiders releasing.  New World Aeternum is the loser here as time for that game is going to No Man's Sky for now.  No Man's Sky is just scratching the right itch.  It also helped that I felt like my $24 spent on the game was a direct donation to HelloGames work on Light No Fire which I can't wait for more information on!

Ashes of Creation

 This game occupies way too much of my thought cycles.  I want the game to be everything that I think it will be but also want it to dull the edge on the potential toxic aspects like always on PvP and the idea of "red" player killers.  Just give us a good MMO and cut the toxic gameplay aspects.  Players cannot freaking help themselves these days so it will never go the way that is expected.

New World Aeternum

 The current loser in the game of "what will heartlessgamer play today".  Still waiting for the big news of Season 10's changes but as that lines up close to when ARC Raiders will land it's hard to know where I am going to be with gaming time.  Also Dune Awakening isn't letting up as my friends and I are still pulling some fun out of that game (even if it feels like pulling teeth most of the time... Drak and Moist would know what I mean... and Drak and Moist you know who you are and who I am and why I am saying this).

Surprise Event: CHOAM Salvage Rights

 A surprise event dropped in Dune Awakening today.  It is called CHOAM Salvage Rights.  Hagga Basin is filled with the sound of turret fire and crashing ships as CHOAM cargo vessels are shot down across the zones.  Shai-Hulud is busy filling his gullet with the remains.  Players can race to collect the cargo before Shai-Hulud appears!

 A new vendor is available at various trading posts and new contracts are being issued to collect the shot down ship's cargo.  On the new vendor are multiple weapon/armor skins and the ability to get a turret as a decoration in your base.

 A video of the action:

  I am secretly hopeful the turrets will become a fully functional base feature in the future as it'd be awesome to be able to build a base in the PvP portion of the DD and set up air defense turrets.  That is the sort of exciting change this game needs! 

Dune Awakening Patches Just Don't Go Well

 

 Dune Awakening is having a rough patch day.  While the most recent patch brings a slew of improvements to the game and makes the end game deep desert more approachable for players not interested in PvP it also has brought a host of issues.

 The biggest issue players seem to be facing are crashes or being stuck on the entering server screen.  Players are reporting that when pressing "continue" to enter a server they get stuck on the loading/entering server screen for several minutes.  Others are reporting they are just crashing at this step.  No workaround is known as of this posting.

 Next; it seems like a new dupe has been likely introduced (while old dupes were fixed in the patch).  This time instead of naked players sacrificing themselves at the auction house in the capital cities we have naked players sacrificing themselves a the public thopter transport stations.  At this point in Dune Awakening it is assumed any naked players using respawn anywhere is some form of exploit to dupe items.

 The patch brought us the coveted "depost/extract all water" feature which will save millions of clicks for players.  Also full water containers can now be sold.  However, the change also seems to have brought the ability for players to enter other players bases and steal their water.  Players are logging in to find their cisterns drained.

 And not necessarily on the "bug" front but the community seems torn on the changes to the Deep Desert.  Previously players had to venture far into the PvP region of the desert to find Tier 6 resource nodes to harvest.  A bit of risk for a big reward.  Now the PvE area of the desert is loaded with Tier 6 resources and there is a mad scramble to lock in those safe PvE areas for harvesting.  Personally I see it as a good change but understand the community feedback that it takes away from the risk/reward that the PvP deep desert provided.

 I am still playing the game and will check out the patch some more.  

Dune Awakening Has Me Thinking About Ashes of Creation

 

 I haven't posted about Ashes of Creation in a while as I made a decision to try and avoid getting myself to intertwined in it's affairs after the whole situation with Narc went down.  Yet the more I play Dune Awakening and follow the community reaction to it's mechanics the more I think back to what Steven Sharif has planned for Ashes of Creation.

Ashes of Creation, like Dune Awakening, envisions an end game centered on PvP and player conflict for limited resources.  In Dune that is the Deep Desert zone and in Ashes it will be more traditional fantasy RPG contention over dungeons and zones.  Throughout each game players have ways of interacting with each other; both positive and negative.

 It is the negative interactions that worry me the most as the general experience in Dune has shown the worse side of gamers.  If there is some way the game allows a player to do something to another player in Dune it is being done and often done in a way to avoid the consequence of the action.  

 Blocking a player ship so they can't take off?  Unfortunately happens too often in the safe zones.  Purposely causing the worm to appear faster near a player risking all of their gear getting destroyed?  Happens.  Training NPCs to destroy powered down bases?  It's a new national pastime in Dune Awakening and while a powered down base is likely from an inactive player there is no doubt a player that stepped away for a vacation that will come back to a very rude awakening.

 And it is those sorts of crappy player interactions that worry me when it comes to games like Ashes of Creation and Steven's intent for the game to be full PvP with only a reputation system as a guard rail.  Kill players too frequently and your player killer character will be banished from society and weakened.  Of course as we are hearing from the Ashes open alpha testing this just means players find ways to get around this by training NPCs over players or tricking players into attacking them first so they can retaliate.  The sort of crappy player behaviors that adapt to code changes designed to stop them faster than the developers like to admit.

 I want Ashes of Creation to bring back that big open world idea we all want out of an MMORPG.  I want there to be freedom and surprises to find in how players interact together.  I am just worried that Dune Awakening is proving to me that us as players can't be trusted in the virtual world. 

Monday Screenshots: Carrier in Dune Awakening

 Blaugust 2025 rolls on and I realized today that it has been a while since I posted a Monday Screenshots post so what better time to resurrect a blogging prompt than during Blaugust!  My friends and I hit a goal we set for ourselves in Dune Awakening: we finished building our first carrier.  Then we took it out for a spin in Hagga Basin and had a hilarious time.

We had to expand the base to fit Big Bertha; even then the wings don't fit!

Getting dropped off in Sheol's radiation zone; not in frame is our mining buggy

Inventory full, buggy tucked safely underneath, and heading back to base.

Unrelated screenshot; just a cool shot to end the night harvesting spice out in the Deep Desert.

 

July 2025 In Review

July 2025 has come and gone and Blaugust 2025 is here!  But before we can jump into my Blaugust activities we need to look back at July.

The Blog

Blogger recorded visits for July: 50,824 (don't ask me why the chart doesn't match the number)

In other metrics:

• Posts:
  
• Target:  n/a (been unmotivated lately to blog so every post is a bonus in July)
• Posted: 7
• Difference: +7
•  Search Trends
• Search trends changed in June and that trend continued in July:
• "arc raiders news" - everyone still wants Arc Raiders news and they aren't going to find it on this blog because there isn't much news coming out.
• "arc raiders countdown" - I don't know why people keep searching for this but they do and they end up on the blog here.
• In "things I observed in search console":
• Two of my posts about Call of the Wild: the Angler continue to be top pages visited from Google.  The game has ended development but it seems people still are looking for information.
• Bottom Fishing in the Angler 
• the Angler Multiplyer Woes
•  My thoughts on Once Human's end game are also a frequent flier for Google searchers.
• End Game Thoughts on Once Human

What I Played

My friends and I continued to play Dune Awakening.  We briefly joined a guild but the guild folded shortly after; which was OK because they let us take a bunch of supplies from the guild base.  We changed sietches and started a new base which is more well organized.  By end of month we had progressed to the end game in the Deep Desert and most of our playtime now is either going into the Deep Desert to shoot rockets from our thopters or doing crafting/gathering so that we can go into the Deep Desert to shoot rockets.

New World drew me back in to complete the Season 8 pass before the season ended in late July.  I didn't do much more than grind the pass so not much to share. 

We also had a spat of internet outages in July which meant I put some more time into my career mode in Wreckfest which continues to be my go to offline

My youngest son is also big time into Minecraft now and at the age where we can start carefully playing in survival mode.  That has been fun to get the youngest (6) and oldest (16) and myself (old) into a shared world building and playing together.  We've done a bunch of creative mode but survival is a much more engaging experience so is worth mentioning here.

Years Ago

1 Year Ago

July 2024 brought a surprise hit to my gaming PC in Once Human.  As my post on the subject indicates: Once Human Has No Right To Be This Popular.  The game was a janky buggy mess but boy was it fun.  It is very similar in nature to Dune Awakening but Dune has been much less fun in comparison.  The fun didn't last as my group and I gave up Once Human after the first seasonal reset.

We also got to test Throne and Liberty's global version.  The beta impressed enough for my friends and I to give it a go later in 2024.  

5 Years Ago

July 2020 featured no blog posts.

10 Years Ago

In July of 2015 I wasn't blogging much, but between June and July I was enjoying the game Town of Salem.  It is a hidden role game similar in nature to One Night Werewolf for anyone familiar with it.  And since I made a blog post about it during a time I was not blogging much at all it must have made an impression on me!

15 Years Ago

In July of 2010 I declared Amalur as a failure.  This was well before it became the infamous failure along with it's developer, 38 Studios.  Maybe I am MMO gaming's version of Nostradamus? 

We were also getting ready for Guild Wars 2 in July 2010.  I had posted reasons why it was going to succeed and reasons why it was going to fail. The big argument back then was MMOs with the number 2 in the title were a bad idea and the genre was littered with failed games (AC2, UO2,EQ2).  Guild Wars 2 was also causing some drama by removing dedicated healers from the game as players all focused on their own self healing.  Folks back then were very attached to their roles in the "holy trinity" (healer/DPS/tank).

Fast forward 15 years later and Guild Wars 2 is still going strong and proved the market wrong about MMOs with the number 2 in their title.  Also folks ended up not too concerned about not having a traditional healer role and more "support" type roles emerged while everyone basically got to contribute to DPS.  Guild Wars 2 is also regarded as a "top MMO" in the market these days so obviously did something right.

15 years ago we all thought MMO websites were going to be BIG BUSINESS as a flurry of activity around them resulted in website owners making bank.  Oh how wrong we were.  With that said if anyone want's to drop me a cool million for this little slice of the internet hit me up! 

20 Years Ago

In July of 2005 I was really into PvP in World of Warcraft.  I was also wrapping up my four part review for the game. 

Based on my recollection of my summer vacation in 2005 apparently you still collected bugs on your car during long road trips.  Fast forward 20 years later and I can't remember the last time my car was plastered with dead insects after a road trip; even after a 30+ hour road trip in 2024 there was barely a bug smear. 

 

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

 

 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.  

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)

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. 

 

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.

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.
 

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. 

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.

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. 

I'm not playing Dune Awakening (yet)

 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.

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.