Watch On
Friends, I’ve consumed a lifechanging quantity of mind-altering substances and decreased my mind to moist goo, and in return the tides of time have revealed to me the discharge date for Dune: Awakening, Funcom’s survival MMO tackle Herbert’s sandy-verse that I had a surprisingly good time with at a demo final month. Now you are all of the recipients of the identical grand message, as a result of the studio’s gone and put out a launch date trailer at this time.
Dune: Awakening hits PC on May 20 this 12 months for $50, with console launch dates but to come back. For some purpose—most likely due to my Pavlovian response to something underneath the ‘survival’ rubric—I hold considering of the sport’s launch as an early entry factor, however that is not proper. May 20 would be the sport’s full, 1.0 launch. I did not know we had been allowed to do these anymore.
The trailer itself reveals off plenty of the sooner elements of the sport that I noticed in my demo. You play a minion dispatched by the Bene Gesserit to “discover the Fremen” and “awaken the sleeper” within the sport’s alternate-timeline model of Arrakis the place Paul Atreides was by no means born and homes Harkonnen and Atreides are locked in a War of Assassins. Your ship crashes, a fella in a stillsuit helps you out, and off you go constructing your self somewhat dwelling, losing scavengers, and plundering dungeons for sources.
If you have not been following this one, maybe you since you share my kneejerk lack of curiosity in issues each ‘survival’ and ‘MMO,’ I’d encourage you to place that apart. My time with Dune: Awakening was genuinely enjoyable and thrilling, in no small half as a result of I discovered I may depart behind plenty of the humdrum stuff you often do in video games like this (tree-punching, arduous resource-collection) to get into the meat of its exploration and outré, very Dune-y fight. Also I made somewhat bald Harkonnen fella who was simply absolutely the weirdest form of freak.
Though I did not get hands-on time with later-game stuff, Funcom makes that sound fairly intriguing as nicely. Once you have received the fundamentals of survival down, the sport strikes into the political realm, with you and no matter participant faction you have signed as much as manoeuvring within the Landsraad (Dune’s space-parliament) to safe legal guidelines and procedures that make it easier to out and screw over your enemies. If the studio pulls that off, I anticipate some EVE Online-style political insanity as gamers concoct grand schemes to stab each other within the again.
