Dune: Awakening News

New Gameplay Impressions Dropping Today

Greetings Sleepers,

Last week, we welcomed journalists and content creators from all over the world to visit our offices in Oslo, Norway, and play Dune: Awakening. Arrakis welcomed them with blistering heat, deadly sandstorms, and a taste of power.

Now, the time has come to see their impressions after spending several hours in the game! They begin dropping today, so keep your eyes open.

In the meantime, we’d also like to give you a glimpse behind the scenes at the event:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As the impressions arrive, we’ll be adding them here.

You can also catch many of the incoming impressions through our channels, on
Discord, (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube Shorts).

Get ready to rise from survival to greatness in a multiplayer survival experience on a massive scale. Wishlist now and land on Arrakis early 2025.

Dune Awakening's spice is in full flow, and its biggest bug is its best feature

Sticking a media playtest for a Dune game in the frigid depths of a Norwegian January is peak comedic irony. Yet there I was, layered up, exploring the unforgiving Arrakean desert from Oslo's former multiplex-turned-gaming hub, Eldorado, having been invited by developer Funcom. While the venue may serve a different purpose nowadays, I still witnessed moments of absolute cinema during my six-hour Dune Awakening preview as I wrestled with raiders, legged it from sandworms, and familiarized myself with the laws of the desert. God made Arrakis to test the faithful, and Funcom's making Dune Awakening to test the gamers.

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The Dune Awakening team had "a bunch of constraints" placed on what they could show by working with Hollywood

Dune Awakening creative director Joel Bylos revealed during a press Q&A earlier this month that "a bunch of constraints" were put in place for the team as part of its collaboration with Hollywood. This, it turns out, was one of the core reasons why the game takes place in an alternate history.

Faction imbalance is a problem as old as MMOs themselves, one must only look at World of Warcraft servers being dominated by either the Alliance or Horde as an example of how players love flocking to the faction leading the pack. Dune Awakening is no different, though according to creative director Joel Bylos, the team has a solution in the works to combat it: a third faction.

It's a tough genre, the survival game. Ever since The Forest and Rust exploded in popularity, dozens of would-be rivals have come along, and Steam is now full of games where you can scavenge, craft, and hunt. The Long Dark is getting a sequel. Project Zomboid has been surging lately. But if there's one upcoming survival sim with the pedigree to outshine its competitors then it's Dune Awakening. A kind of alternate-history take on Frank Herbert's sci-fi odyssey, we still don't know precisely when Dune Awakening is coming out - but it's already got thousands of players on PC.