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.
