Blogs
on April 22, 2026
Whether it be the scorching desert or the few underground laboratories I stumbled upon, Dune Awakening is visually stunning. Funcom told me it is planning to "elevate the game above the jank of most survival games," and for the most part that intention is obvious when you play. The lighting in the desert, particularly at night, is gorgeous, while the inhabited areas are far more detailed than you might expect from the ge
Thankfully, Awakening’s Arrakis itself is great fun to explore. Not because of any unique visual choices - it’s a lot of rocks and sand dunes as you’d expect - but because of what you need to think about as you go from waypoint to waypo
look at this site a high level, Dune: Awakening has some very lofty goals. It is a shared open-world survival game , so players can encounter, work with, and compete with others. The game takes players through four stages that Funcom internally refers to as Survive, Protect, Expand, and Control. This is not necessarily hard-defined elements in the game but a description in which the gameplay evolves. Players arrive on the iconic planet of Arrakis, also known as Dune, as a prisoner and must survive its endless sands, beginning the Survive "phase." Here, water is a survival demand and Spice is a rarity; by the Control "phase," players should be able to wield both as resources of political influence in endgame content, player trades, and so fo
Being a multiplayer survival game set on a vast desert planet, Dune Awakening has to work hard to avoid being repetitive. There’s only so much sand you can run across before it grows boring. While starting the player with nothing at all - no gear, no personality, and no backstory - what has Funcom done to ensure the politics, lore, and epic storytelling of Frank Herbert’s Dune isn’t lost amidst all the busy w
Dune: Awakening 's combat is also gone over during this sequence, beginning with melee combat. Integrated into the game's melee combat is the ability to stagger enemies by slashing at them multiple times, leaving them open to future attacks. Enemy attacks can also be blocked, with a perfectly timed block executing a parry attack that staggers the opponent. Should players be staggered by an enemy, however, they can quickly dash out of it by inputting the correct
A: W hen we began working with Dune , we made the decision that we wanted to be very accurate with the setting, right? I guess that's the best way to put it. There are a couple of specific things with Dune - take the survival gameplay, for example. You can't just punch a tree. There are no trees to punch. It just wouldn't fit in the setting, ri
One other important element introduced during Dune: Awakening 's tutorial is the Cutteray, which is the player's primary mining tool. Using the Cutteray's Analysis Mode, players scan a resource to detect hidden structural weaknesses within it. Once a weakness has been detected, it appears as a jagged line across the node, and the Cutteray is then used to trace the line until the resource breaks and the materials are automatically added to the player's inventory. The Cutteray can also cut open certain locked doors, making it a very useful tool, but the best thing about it is that it isn't just a "point and shoot" harvesting t
Combat can go any number of ways in survival games, and Dune: Awakening finds itself somewhere right in the middle. It is fun and serviceable, even if it is not exactly groundbreaking for the genre. Players can acquire new skills throughout the skill trees, based on archetypes in Dune like the Bene Gesserit , and use those in various combat encounters. Because of my choices at the start of the game, I began with a deployable turret. Throughout my time with the game, it became my go-to skill because it would consistently kill all enemies in the area very quickly. I later acquired a deployable shield wall that would also let me protect myself and let the turret put in the work. The combination was fun, although there were times when I had (or wanted) to get involved myself. My third skill was effectively a poison grenade, but I only used it if my turret couldn't be deplo
It is "one of the challenges with regular sandbox survival games," Whelan said. "You know, you rub sticks together to make fire. You cut down a tree for a stack of logs. It's a very organic, understandable, relatable thing. In this universe, we just don't have that. And we're not underestimating the intelligence of our players. They can figure this stuff out. They know that there are technologies that are available to th
During our time with the beta, we got to visit three of Dune: Awakening 's zones, but there will be a whopping twenty-one in the full game. Each zone follows a similar loop and is essentially structured the same. There are multiple side quests and activities to complete and locations to explore in each zone, with Shipwrecks that even function as PvP zones with some of the game's best loot. Dune: Awakening 's story also gradually guides players from one zone to the next, and the pacing feels right on par for where the game is at curren