Dune: Awakening Evaluation in progress

We previously previewed Funcom’s survival crafting game Dune: Awakening after spending some time playing the beta. You can read that preview here.

Our impressions haven’t really changed much. What has changed, however, is that we are now on live servers, and this means more waiting than expected. In case you doubt it, I am writing this while waiting for a semi-unscheduled two-hour maintenance to shut down all servers for two hours, and some more. Yesterday I spent most of my time in the queue. The server system in this non-MMO is designed so that there are a large number of worlds, each with 25 smaller servers attached, and your character is tied to one of these, so you can’t just jump to a new one when your own is full.

This is probably because of the semi-permanent homes you build on the planet. Based on the server I play on, it seems Funcom underestimated how many people were actually interested. Every hill in the starting area is full of homemade homes, mostly built by people who obviously didn’t go to architecture school. This also puts pressure on the servers, and I experienced being thrown out several times during interludes and interludes, so it was good that I had played the beta and understood what had happened. I find it hard to stomach having to pay an extra £11 a month for a private server that is more stable. This should be fixed pretty soon.

Oh, and if you’re struggling with graphics glitches, forget about hot-patching. I set an FPS limit – 120 FPS max – and bang, no more problems. The old tricks still work. It’s a little strange that this kind of problem is happening with a game engine, but at least the graphical glitches that occasionally occurred in the beta are completely gone.

The big approach is great for the game, but it also destroys any illusion that you are the only one who crashed and is trying to carry out a secret mission, because there are quite a few others like me, to put it plainly. However, it doesn’t ruin the good atmosphere so much as the stiff animations of the many enemies and other players. The game physics often feel like something that has been around for several years, and I find the jumping animations and everything to do with climbing particularly archaic. It’s strange, because the heat, shadows, light, reflections and surface textures are excellent and of high graphical quality, but the people populating the planet could use an upgrade. It’s as if they forgot to buy an extra physics and animation package for the people who appear in the game.

In practice it doesn’t matter much, because it’s still the battle against the elements that takes up a lot of space – raw survival, especially the first 8-10 hours – so much so that players aren’t in such a hurry to interact. And PvP is not enabled anyway, unless you’ve rented a private server, but frankly that’s not something I want to spend time or money on. And besides, it’s shared with all of us in many areas anyway.

Dune: Awakening is defined as “an open world survival crafting game…. (with) many typical MMO features”, and you still have to take that relatively literally. You’re not going to plant trees and be constructive. You get life by taking it – quite literally – and at least in the beginning by harvesting the blood and resources of others.

This is admittedly a “review-in-progress”, but certain things are unlikely to change. The music, for example, is far too unremarkable, which is a shame. It is rich in atmosphere – especially the combination of church organs and cellos is excellent – and it is clear that real symphonic composition work has been put into it, rather than just some AI-generated nonsense.

Still, running around is still a challenge, especially during the day, and while the distances can be relatively short – less than a kilometer – you still have to plan and take things into account: where is the shortest distance between two areas of cliffs, so you don’t get caught in the open sand? Where are the dew-covered flowers I can drink from, since water is always scarce? And why is it so far to a place with the parts I need for my automatic rifle? That said, I enjoy it, and Funcom deserves credit for its snappy patch response.

If the game were scored today – based on very little – it would be an eight. It’s a mix of crafting, survival and MMO elements, and while I know I’ll have to choose at some point, at the moment I’m enjoying life as a free bird, taking on tasks of both small and large noble families, and perhaps knowing what lies ahead.