We Got A Look At Dune: Awakening’s Massive Desert Maps And MMO Elements
We’ve heard a lot about the survival aspect of Dune: Awakening–such as the way you’ll need to conserve water, stay out of the baking Arrakis sun, and carefully avoid ever-present sandworms. While it seems that staying alive on the least hospitable planet in the universe will take up a lot of your attention, the other part of Dune: Awakening is a slate of MMO elements, including the way you’ll tangle with other players who are also doing their best to survive.
Developer Fancom gave a hands-off demonstration of Dune: Awakening during Summer Game Fest 2024’s Play Days event, giving a quick new look at the survival MMO and particularly showing off a bit of its moment-to-moment gameplay. While we didn’t get to play the game ourselves, we did see it being played, which gave a sense of the fact that while you’re completing quests and keeping yourself alive, there will be times when you’ve got to contend with other players who might want what you have.
The demo picked up right after the player had cleared out an underground ecology lab, one of the locations that serves as Dune: Awakening’s equivalent to a dungeon. We were told that this character was in about the midgame, around 60 hours in, having gone beyond basic survival to gather and craft elements like a suspensor belt–a special bit of levitation technology that allowed them to make very high jumps and to float down from high locations unscathed–and an ornithopter, a flying vehicle for getting around. Leaving the dungeon, the player jumped right into their ornithopter, lifted it up, and transitioned out of the dungeon and out into the desert at large.