Waking Up to Dune Awakening
Chapter 1: Dune. So hot right now.
I’m not going to bury the lede. You probably shouldn’t play Dune: Awakening. The rest of this article is going to be an attempt to explain why, despite my own anti-recommendation, I’m still playing it.
You should know that Dune: Awakening is mean as hell. Up to a point that meanness is clearly intentional. It’s a Dune Simulator, and Dune’s world is mean as hell. Within the first hour it establishes that you’ll need to find water to drink, you’ll need to hide from the sun, and there’s some worms around (you might have heard of them,) what’ll eat all your tasty giblets.
And I signed up for all of that. I love the Dune universe, and I expected a certain amount of “this desert is literally trying to kill you so hard right now.” I did not sign up for “… and because you know that we’re going to have to trick you into letting it.”
Chapter 2: Basic desertology.
Funcom clearly wants you to feel what it would be like to be trapped on Arrakis. You’re dropped into the game with nothing but the clothes on your back and a brief mentor to teach you the basics of not roasting to death in the sun. That means sipping what little water you can find from some plants, the basics of knife combat, sticking to the shadows, and avoiding the open desert.
So far so Dune.
The thing is, it clearly explains these systems. It telegraphs when you’re thirsty, when you’re too hot, and where the shadows are. It explains the consequences of not managing these systems, and it gives you the tools to do so.
If you don’t drink water, you get dehydrated and that impacts your health and stamina. Same if you get too hot.
Wander too far into the deep desert? That’s a paddlin’. And by a paddlin’ I mean you get eaten by the Worm. Shai-hulud.
Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him.
Shai-hulud is many things. In Dune, that includes a hazard, a narrative device, and a trap set by Funcom to make sure you have a Bad Time. At least once. Probably several times. But we’ll get to that.
A “hard” game is one that sets challenges in front of you, clearly telegraphs what you need to learn, know, and do, and then teaches you to overcome the obstacle. The Dark Souls games are famously hard, but filled to the brim with challenges that you can learn to overcome.
A “hostile” game is one that does not telegraph what you need to learn, know, or do. It ambushes you with systems you have no reason to understand, with punishments you couldn’t predict, or which you cannot learn to overcome.
Dune is a hostile game, and Shai-Hulud is the reason why.
Chapter 3: That’s some pretty nice stuff you got there.
It took me about ten hours, start to finish, to complete the first “area” of Dune: Awakening. That’s pretty average, I think. I didn’t 100% complete it because I knew I’d have both the reason and the ability to come back later, but I did all but one of the optional exploration activities, and all of the solo dungeons.
The last quest in the first section of the game has, functionally, three parts.
- Pack up all your stuff.
- Go North.
- Destroy any bases you have in the first area.
The idea here, I think, is to stop the player from being precious about whatever they’ve built in what is effectively the newbie area. Also, to clean up that part of the map so that there’s room for new players to build.
Oh. Also. To get you and everything you own eaten by the worm.
See here’s the thing, to get to the second area of the game you have to cross this huge stretch of open desert. It is basically impossible to do that without summoning Shai-Hulud. The “smart” way to do this, what you’ll find if you google before hand, is to carry nothing and get your base fully established in the second area, and then use the between-trade-posts flightpath functionality to import your stuff.
If you google.
If you do what the quest tells you to do, better than even odds you lose everything and have to start over again from scratch in the first area.
And when I say everything, I mean everything. In most games with crafting if you learn a recipe you know how to make that forever, so if you lose your Cool Thing, you just have to gather the resources. This is true for basic recipes in Dune, but not the cool special equipment recipes. Those you have to go find again. Often with a 25% drop rate and 45 minute respawn timer.
It’s one thing to do a corpse run. I’ve been doing that since the late 90s. Everquest had corpse runs. Losing everything is a betrayal of the conventions of the genre.
Chapter 4: We are enemies now.
This is what I meant by Dune being a hostile game, and Shai-Hulud being the agent of that hostility. The quest design is specifically written to encourage you into a situation where you’re going to lose everything. I think they did this for two reasons.
- To teach you early on what happens when you get eaten by the worm, because oh boy are you going to get eaten by the worm.
- Because players followed the game’s earlier advice about staying out of the open sands, they effectively need to be forced into a situation where the worm has a chance to eat them.
A better design would have incentivized risking the worm. Dune: Awakening has to force you into it. That trek from the first to the second area is the first time, but not the last.
Roughly a third of the way into the second area you’ll run into the next story quest that absolutely must be completed to continue which will require you to tempt fate. You’ll need to gather 20 of a resource called “Flour Sand.” The flour sand generally spawns in places that attract the worm. The tools you need to gather it safely won’t be available for two more zones.
The best advice anyone has is either team up with players way ahead of level than you. You’ll need a group of them, so that they can use thumpers to distract the worm while you pray that you can safely gather your Flour Sand.
Or, and apparently this is the much more common thing, you wait for the weekly reset and hope a flour sand bed spawns adjacent to rock where Shai-Hulud can’t go.
When the generally accepted way to deal with a mechanic is to cheese it, to avoid the entire encounter if at all possible, that’s a pretty strong sign that something’s wrong with the mechanic or the encounter or both. In this case, they couldn’t convince the players to engage with Shai-Hulud because the cost of doing so is total, so they made it a requirement of progress.
Chapter 5: Hope you like those choices you had to make before you knew what any of them meant.
For the first couple zones of Dune your main source of water is going to be the lifeblood of NPCs. Kill the raiders, drain the blood, filter it into water in your base. You need it to drink, and you need it for the tier 2 crafting recipes.
Hope you picked a good combat spec when you created your character, then, because you’ll be doing a lot of it. Oh, and you’ll be stuck with whatever you picked until at least the midgame.
For a brief but related digression, you might be surprised to learn that in lots of games I pick a caster class. The professional internet wizard likes fireball, news at 11. But I’ve also learned that genre convention usually means “magic users,” for whatever that means in especially sci-fi games, are often at a disadvantage in the early game that I don’t enjoy overcoming.
Except in Dune. Where gun bad. I should have foreseen this because of the power of personal shields, but it turns out the two “good” starting classes are sword master and mentat. So of course I picked soldier.
That would be all fine and good because Dune will, eventually, let you unlock all of the available classes. Somewhere in the deep midgame. Long after the early challenges of fighting NPCs for water have passed.
It doesn’t tell you any of this up front. There’s very little information during character creation about how the classes play, what powers you’ll have available, or the consequences of picking gun vs sword. Hope you happen to remember how important personal shields and slow-moving blades were to the overall Dune universe.
In most survival games, it’s a process of becoming increasingly more specialized as you go. That’s because early on you need lots of flexibility to overcome the limitations of your lack of skill, gear, and resources. Dune turns this genre convention on its head, and not to its benefit. I always appreciate trying something new, but in a game built around being punishing it would be nice to be able to adapt my skills to better accommodate my play style.
Chapter 6: Combat, I guess?
Speaking of combat, there’s not a lot to recommend it. Most combat devolves into running around and clicking the left mouse button. Or sometimes you click and hold, if you want to do the slow blade thing.
Rather than make it more tactically interesting, they made it harder by pairing enemies up into harder-to-defeat groups. In area 1 it’s not so bad, but area two loves to put a blade user with personal shield together with a gun user. The net effect of this is that frequently you better hope you can kill the gun user before the blade user gets close, because once they gang up on you it’s mostly just waiting for the stunlock to end long enough to run away and use a bandage.
This feels like “cheating” in the design, because it’s not really something you can learn to overcome with skill. There’s no patterns to learn, no tactics that really help. A little bit you can learn to kill certain enemies first, if you can, but mostly it’s a process of running in, killing what you can, running away, healing, and repeating that tedious loop until there’s no enemies left.
Chapter 7: Survival of the fittest and also me.
Heat. Thirst. Wormsign. These are systems that are harsh, but fair. The game telegraphs them, it gives you the tools to manage them. They’re the kind of challenge that makes a survival sandbox sim interesting. Without some level of challenge, there’d be no “survival” to the “survival sandbox.”
They contribute in meaningful ways to the sense of the game being Dune. They create immersion and thematic tone.
Dune: Awakening is at its best when the thing trying to kill me is the harsh desert of Arrakis.
Dune: Awakening is at its worst literally the entire rest of the time.
I want to learn to overcome fair challenges through skill, through unlocking and building technology, through mastering the desert and its lessons. Neither Shai-Hulud nor combat can be mastered. They’re just tedious slogs I have to interact with to get to the tasty nougat at the center of the experience.
Chapter 8: So why am I still here?
At the end of the day, why am I still playing a game I don’t recommend?
The alternate-timeline premise is compelling as heck. Without giving anything away you wouldn’t learn by watching the opening cinematic: Paul Muad’dib was never born. Without Paul, the assassination of Duke Leto fails. The Harkonnen and Atreides are in a war of assassins for control of Arrakis.
And the Fremen are… Missing? The game wants me to believe they’ve been wiped out. I’ll believe it when we’re three DLC in and they’ve avoided the temptation to bring them back.
But the thing is I want to explore the depths of this alternate-universe Dune. I want to learn the secrets of the Fremen, even if only through the spice-memories they’ve left behind.
The world feels like Dune through and through, even if the game itself feels like rubbing my knuckles on a cheese grater at times.
Chapter 9: Where to go from here?
In the end, Dune: Awakening is an imperfect simulacra of the game I think most of us would have wanted. But it’s still the best version of Dune to ever be represented in the digital format. It is honest and true to the world it’s trying to represent. It is, as I said, mean as hell.
It’s trying to be something, which is more than I can say about whichever mapfucker Ubisoft has made most recently.
All of the rough edges are the consequences of a team that clearly felt like they had something to say about what it would be like to inhabit this world, and even if I strongly disagree with some of those decisions, I still respect that they had the guts to make them. That they could make a game this hostile to the conventions of its own genre. That’s worth something. And I think that’s part of what I find compelling.
So. No. I don’t recommend Dune: Awakening. But I’m playing it anyway.