Dune 2: Even More Dune
“It sounds like you might be playing the ghost of a better game that lives inside this one.” – Claude Sonnet 4
Previously: Waking Up to Dune Awakening
Part 1: How Stella Got Her Groove Back, or, When The Worm Lost its Teeth
Okay, so. Uh. I’m still playing Dune: Awakening.
Yeah, I also think that’s weird.
I’ve never spent so many words explaining why I don’t recommend something only to go on and keep engaging with it. Usually I’d call it good and walk away. But there’s something here in the dark heart of Arakkis that keeps me engaged, and now I’m going to spend the next however many thousand words trying to find it.
The first time I got eaten by the worm, it took everything I had. The next five to ten hours of game time was rebuilding lost ground. There’s equipment I had that I never replaced. It sucked. And I think it sucked even more because the game really wants you to make exactly the series of mistakes I made. It doesn’t tell you that you have to, but it definitely encourages it.
But the thing is, once you’ve got a base established in the second area (whose name I never remember. Let’s call it The Gap.) Once you’ve got a base established in The Gap, it’s actually super easy to get back and forth between the first area (hereafter called The Basin) and The Gap.
Run to the nearest outpost, spend a small amount of in-game currency, fly on down. Which meant I could also head back to the now-simpler enemies of the Basin and grind for resources, for recipes. Things that had been hard to come by in hour 10 had become trivial.
Somewhere around hour 30 I realized that I no longer feared the worm, because the limit of the damage it can cause me is what I happen to be carrying at any given time, and that’s a passing fraction of what I’ve stockpiled in my base. It’s slowly transformed from a catastrophic “lose everything” event to a mild inconvenience where I’d have to spend 15 minutes recrafting some gear. All the resources I need are in chests at home.
Slowly, I was beginning to master desert power.
Part 2: Shop Smart. Shop S-Mart.
This is not my original observation, but I forget where I saw it first: Dune: Awakening is a game of eras. Foot power, buggy power, and sky power.
This is my original observation: It’s actually worse than that. Every region of the desert is its own S-Curve.
This is an S-Curve:
It takes a while to get going, then suddenly it goes up a lot, then it stalls out at the top.
You start the game with nothing and are quickly taught to make scavenged weapons and tissue paper armor. It takes most players 10-20 hours to get out of the Basin, over which you upgrade to your first real weapons and armor. The enemies go from being able to nearly instantly kill you to pretty easy to overcome.
Then, you head to the next area and the really cool gear you arrived with SUCKS! You’re back at the bottom of a new S-Curve! And the cycle repeats, once again climbing the local regional violence economy.
But that also means every new area is a transition from feeling competent, of having mastery, to once again being at the bottom of the food chain. The ideal game usually has a much smoother difficulty curve, where you feel like you’re getting better the entire time you play. In Dune: Awakening, you’re continually being kicked back to the bottom of the curve.
As I master the area I’m in, it becomes easy and fun. It’s even more fun to go back to a previous area and absolutely wreck it. But there’s no way to carry that into the next area. No matter how good I’ve gotten, I’m limited by resource access to the current tier of gear and weapons, which won’t prepare me for what comes next.
Part 3: Hostile Teaching Methods and Other Pedagogy
Over time what I’ve realized is that the core problem is one of communication. The game fails repeatedly to communicate.
Case in point: there are basically two kinds of enemies in Dune. Shooters and stabbers. Shooters hang back and try to gun at you. Stabbers try to get close and poke you with their sharp pokers.
In the tutorial the game introduces the concept of a “dash.” Press alt, assuming you’re using the default keyboard map, and you’ll dash in the direction of your movement keys. Do it three times to prove you can. Never mentions it again.
Dash is the single most important thing the tutorial ever teaches you, and it spends about 30 seconds on it.
Dash is the thing that lets you escape when the AI gangs up on you. Dash is the thing that lets you not get stabbed to death by shield-wearing raiders. Dash is fundamental, critical, life-giving. For being so fundamental to the balance and design of combat, it sure is a shame that you never need to dash away from any of the enemies in the Basin.
You see, the game teaches you the basic combat inputs under pressure. You’ve got the classic tutorial unkillable enemy that just keeps coming at you until you correctly input the dash command three times. But then it sets you loose in The Basin, an easier-than-the-rest-of-the-game semi-tutorial where the AI is tuned down to make worse decisions and be easier to kill, and does not in any way reflect the complexity of future AI combat decisions.
So it’s real easy to forget about dash. Or think you don’t need it. Because you won’t, for about the next 20 hours. Better hope you remember how to do that when you get to The Gap and it becomes the only way to survive.
Better design here would have looked like enemies in The Basin using the full capabilities of the AI, who behaved like future enemies, but with downtuned damage and HP. Better to have an enemy you still need to dash away from who mostly isn’t that dangerous when you get it wrong than an enemy that stands there and lets you murder them until the difficulty ranks up.
Part 4: Games Should Be Fun The Entire Time You’re Playing Them
Dune: Awakening is a game about taking risks. Also about the planet trying to kill you. Also worms. (Which are trying to kill you.)
I’m a conservative and loss-avoidant player.
These shouldn’t mix. And mostly don’t.
Here’s the thing, I have aggressive goals in life which mean, among many other things, that I get to play maybe two or three hours of video games a week, on average. Often less. Which also means I do not have the luxury of being able to start over.
Starting over is catastrophic. Starting over means you’re now competing for my heart and mind with starting fresh. The opportunity cost of playing the same hour of a game twice is an hour of another game I’ll never get to play. It’s a high bar under the best of circumstances.
What this means is that I generally play games in a way that minimizes my downside risk. If you make me choose between doing the same one-hour task twice, with a 50% chance of success, or doing a two-hour grind once, with a 100% chance of success, I will always do the two-hour grind. As long as I enjoy the process of the grind.
Some designers would call this “optimizing the fun out of the game.” Because they have decided that fun means playing it a certain way. And that’s cool, I guess, that they know me so well that they can describe with authority whether or not I’m having fun.
But here’s another thing: you don’t pay my sub.
At a certain point if players aren’t playing the way you intended, you need to consider that they’re rational agents making decisions under pressure. Maybe it’s not as fun as you think it is.
Part 5: Nobody Wants PvP, Funcom
Dune wants to be EVE: Online so bad. Like so, so bad. By which I mean the “drain” in this sink-and-drain economy was clearly meant to be end-game PvP. Everything is in service of end-game PvP. Every little system, every weird decision, it’s all there to support the Deep Desert and the War of Assassins between Harkonnen and Atreides.
Except nobody wants it.
How do I know that?
Evidence the One - Faction demographics. There are two factions you can choose, and in fact you are forced to pick between. Atreides or Harkonnen. The Atreides faction gets buffs to building stuff and working together. The Harkonnen faction gets buffs to PvP.
Atreides outnumbers Harkonnen 14:1. (I really wish I could find my source on this. You’ll have to take my word for it. At least as of the time of writing it’s pretty easy to find threads of people complaining about the clear faction disparity but many of them are unlinkable for a variety of “people being awful to each other on the internet” reasons. So, your Google may vary.)
Evidence the Two - Dune launched with an all-PvP endgame, which the first two content patches immediately reversed.
I suspect they did this primarily because they really wanted Dune to be a Live Service game. If you have a Live Service hit, you have a license to print money.
Notably, not because the game is better this way.
In fact, I’d argue it would have been a lot better as a single player experience.
The clear antagonist of Dune is the desert itself. A harsh, unforgiving desert, with giant sandstorms and hostile fauna. A single-player Dune game could have told a deeply compelling story about learning to survive and ultimately thrive in the hostile environment.
But compelling stories have narrative conclusions and conclusions don’t convince you to spend money in the cash shop.
Part 6: Okay, So Why Am I Still Playing?
Now that I’ve spent another, what, 20,000 words anti-recommending a game, you might rightly ask why I’m still playing it. That’s a fair question.
For all of my critiques above, and please, consider them critiques not complaints, there is the core of something really compelling at the heart of Dune: Awakening. The “ghost of a better game” as Claude so aptly put it.
I love that they took a chance on an alternate-world history where Paul Atreides was never born, where we can explore what might have been without the weight of knowing how the story was meant to go.
I love exploring the backstory of the Fremen.
I love mastering the unforgiving environment, surviving in a place that is not meant for me to thrive.
The world feels like Dune through and through, even though the game sometimes feels like rubbing my knuckles on a cheese grater.
Part 7: The Dune That Could Have Been
Dune is a deeply flawed game, that I think wasted some of its best potential in pursuit of a live service model that never should have been.
If I had been in charge I think I would have leaned into a narrative-heavy single player survival crafter experience.
Imagine instead that the game opens with you stranded on Arakkis, alone, with none of the tools you need to survive. Similar to the scene where Paul and the Lady Jessica have nothing but a single tent and a Stilsuit each, provided by Dr Yueh as compensation for his betrayal.
You find your way to a lone outpost in the desert, where rough-and-tumble locals trade you the basics you need to survive through a series of tutorial quests that also teach you the basics of the game. How to find water in the desert, which you use as a currency. How to scavenge for food or small bits of technology.
Eventually, you are presented with the opportunity to join up with a band of raiders who take you under their wing, just long enough to grow attached, before the cruel desert takes them from you and leaves you stranded once again. But this time with your wits and knowledge, and an opportunity. To sign up with the Atreides or the Harkonnen. A war of assassins is brewing and they’ll each take any competent fighter willing to sign.
Choose the Atreides, and you’ll master the desert through community and collaboration. Choose the Harkonnen and you’ll master the desert through cruelty and the swift application of superior technology.
Or, an unspoken third path. Find your own way, to the Fremen, who will teach you to live in harmony with nature. Reclaim the planet for its native people, evicting Atreides and Harkonnen both. Write a story wholly unlike the one the game tried to set out for you, in a true narrative sandbox.
I dunno man, that sounds like a pretty good game to me.
While I’m at it? Get rid of guns entirely and lean into the knives-and-shields combat that’s a hallmark of the Dune universe. I don’t know this to be true objectively, but I suspect the reason Dune: Awakening leans so heavily into guns are in service of the PvP model. A knives-only combat system probably didn’t work well, and all the various models of guns got added to balance the PvP that nobody even wants anyway.
I can see so clearly the game that Dune: Awakening could have been, if not for the economic realities at the dark heart of the games industry. It’s expensive to make a game as big as Dune tries to be.
Over the next six to twelve months I suspect they’ll roll back a lot of the PvP, though not all of it. For one thing, the sunk cost fallacy comes for all of us. For another, it’s clearly core to the design they built and it’d cost a fortune to rebuild a launched game from the ground up. They really only need it to be “good enough” that players keep playing when the inevitable cash shop launches.
It’s hard to know exactly how long I’ll keep playing Dune. Probably long enough to get another blog post out of it. Eventually I’d like to talk about some of the things I think they did pretty well. For all of my critiques, they’ve done an incredibly job of making the desert feel true to the Dune universe.
But I opened this essay with a question: why have I spent 40 hours on a game I don’t recommend? I’ve offered a lot of examples that I think point at an answer, but nothing concrete. I’ve talked about what I might have done differently, but not why I stay.
Frustratingly, I still don’t know. Even after exploring both the world of Dune: Awakening and my thoughts in this essay, there’s something ineffable about the experience of living on Arakkis. About testing myself against the harshest environment known to Sci-Fi, and finding it wanting.
Maybe that points at it more than anything else. Because the desert tested me, and I survived.