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.  

Camelot Unchained Video

 I did something I rarely do: I watched a YouTube video at normal speed. Why?  Because Camelot Unchained has a new video out and I needed to evaluate the game at normal speed.  You can watch the video below and then read on for my thoughts. 

 For a bit of catch up; Camelot Unchained is a crowd funded MMO piloted by Mark Jacobs of Dark Ages of Camelot (DAoC) and Mythic Entertainment fame.  It has been in development now for 13 years since it was first kick started in the heyday of Kickstarer.  The supposed "beta 1" has been ongoing for at least 7 years at this point.  To say it's been a long time coming is being polite.

 So what did we get for 13 years of development? To be honest: a game that looks like it was being released 13 years ago.  The graphics are antiquated, the UI is yesterday, and the player movement/combat looks dated.

 But, and I mean this as a big but, it looks playable and visuals aside I can at least see myself being interested in giving the game a try should it ever make an open beta or release.  While everything felt slow in the video and polish is missing (damage numbers going to the 8th decimal point for example) I still got a sense for what they were aiming for and I got some DAoC vibes when they were on 

 There are some other details we could squabble about such as it seems range play dominates the combat as we see almost no melee range combat in the video.  The archer that is featured seems to have a very, very long range.  Also the PvE featured is pretty generic; pull a mob and kill it before it can get to you then run away if it does get to you.

 Anyways I'm not here to squabble.  I am just excited to see a game from this team.  Yes, I know there is a bunch of controversy around Mark Jacobs and how he has run things but I'd be lying if I said there isn't drama around every crowd funded MMO at this point.  Just get me the game so I can get the bit of value my Kickstarter dollars I invested.

Battlefield 6 Open Beta Thoughts

Here we go.... again

 The Battlefield 6 open beta opened it's doors early this week and lots of players are jumping in; me included.  I have some thoughts and I am going to come right out and say it: I am not sure what this is but it isn't Battlefield.

 I've never swung so far from hype to disappointment with a game in my entire gaming career.  Coming off an extremely well executed multiplayer reveal event it felt like EA / Dice had everything headed in the right direction for Battlefield 6.  We were back to Battlefield baby!

 How wrong I was now that I am getting a taste of the beta.  It is hard to put into words but the feel of the game is closer to Call of Duty (CoD) than it is Battlefield.  Maps feel claustrophobic, gunplay is sloppy, movement is filled with slides, and I have no idea what they are doing with classes.  How hard was it to just stick with the classic assault, medic, support, and engineer?  Why does everything have to get mixed up and why are weapons not locked to classes?

A dusty street; wonder where the enemy is hiding

 The visuals and sounds of the game are amazing, but the visual clutter (smoke, dust, stuff flying around, etc) makes it very difficult to figure out what is going on.  Enemies that are inside buildings are basically invisible.  It is nearly impossible to look and know where you should expect enemies and where you should not.  It doesn't help that, at least in the beta, the maps feel like they are more corridor shooters than they are battlefields.  Players are just constantly funneled into meat grinders.

 I had hoped with the return of destruction that we'd be able to get some creative ways to get around the meat grinders, but it seems like maps are designed in a way that you can destroy everything around the meat grinder but not the actual meat grinder itself.  Players have to go through them.

 Another area I can't eloquently describe in words, but I'll try is a quote I'll take from my son: "TTK is high but TTD is low".  Basically the amount of time it takes to kill a target feels high but the time it takes you to die is low.  I have had so many encounters where I empty my magazine but haven't landed the kill so have to change to a sidearm to finish it off which then puts me at a disadvantage if there is another player in the fight.  Yet at the same time if I stick my head out around a corner I'm ending up dead instantly.  There has also been times, even when watching the recorded video back, where the damage log in game shows me taking 5 distinct damage but all I can tell is the enemy pulled the trigger one time.  I am assuming there is some desync going on between server and client but it's hard to tell.

Vehicles feel grounded and powerful

 The moment to moment gameplay also offers no downtime or rest.  It is constant action in every mode I've tried; whether conquest or breakthrough.  I can't even count how many times I've broken through enemy lines where I felt like I could take a moment to get my bearings only to have yet another player appear right next to me from some hidden alleyway; they being as surprised to see me as I am to see them.  That constant fight or flight feeling is more a CoD thing than it has ever been a Battlefield thing.

 It is also telling when CoD fans are out there claiming "CoD is dead!" after playing BF6.  This clearly shows 6 is catering towards the CoD fans.  There are numerous CoD streamers that are binging the beta and loving every minute of it. So it really does seem like Battlefield 6 was catering to that segment.

"Large scale battles" minus the "large scale"

 

 With that said there is still vehicles and larger scale fights to be had in Battlefield 6, but they are a lot harder to find than I'd of expected. If someone told me I was playing the next Call of Duty I'd of believed them.  Even the UI feels closer to CoD than it does to Battlefield.  It's a damn shame. Honestly if I want a Battlefield fix I am going back to 2042. For all of it's flaws at least 2042 feels like a Battlefield game. 

Blogging Medium

 I promised as part of Blaugust 2025 that I would talk about and maybe search for a new blogging platform.  I've been on Google's Blogger (aka Blogspot) for over 20 years now and it hasn't had a major update of any sort in several years.  Before I get to exploration of entirely new platforms I do want to talk about a couple that I did already try.  The first one up is Medium and I have some thoughts.

 First, you can visit my experiment on Medium here:  https://medium.com/@heartlessgamer 

 What I liked about Medium is it's clean design. Black text, white background, and no effort to make that simple and clean template become a reality.  Also attractive at the time I tried it was the fact it can import Blogger posts with just a couple clicks so it was easy to port in content for testing purposes.

 A couple features I liked but didn't get to experience were the ability for visitors to leave me private messages as well as the ability to add a "tip the author" option on posts.  I could do the tip thing via any number of services with my blogger blog but that'd take extra effort vs the integrated option with Medium. 

 What I didn't like was that Medium felt like an ecosystem where I was just another cog in the grand scheme.  It felt like I was just putting my posts into a social media platform vs running my own blog.  I also dislike that Medium, like other platforms I investigated, require a cost to use your own custom domain.  It is hard to beat the fact that Blogger supports your own domain at no cost.

 Ultimately Medium didn't hook me and I gave up on it shortly after starting. I wouldn't say it is "off the list" because the member fee is only $5 a month which is not terrible compared to other platforms I'll talk more about in the coming days.

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.