Watch On
I felt like I knew loads about Dune Awakening, having absorbed a lot of the survival MMO’s broader ideas through osmosis. I’d heard about its large sandworms being their very own masters, and its air-to-air ornithopter fight. But till about half an hour in the past, I did not have a transparent image about how all these concepts got here collectively.
Sure, Funcom’s newest is likely to be a ground-up replication of the desert survival, high-level politicking, and factional wars of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi traditional. But what does that imply for me, Joe Fremen? What do I truly do?
Thanks to Funcom’s newest trailer, I now have a a lot clearer thought of what the sport’s fundamentals are. ‘Exploring Arrakis’ is essentially the most concise distillation of the sport’s primary concepts. It’s notionally about how gamers will search to tame the sport’s huge desert wilderness, but it surely additionally acts as a step-by-step information for its early hours of play.
The trailer takes you thru all of the fundamentals of creating your self on Arrakis, from founding your first base, to crafting your first car, to venturing out into the desert to carry out surveys for important sources, which can lead you to uncover factors of curiosity like crashed spaceships, all of which can assist craft new weapons and tools, and increase your base.
Likewise, what comes throughout within the trailer is the physicality of Awakening. The time period ‘MMO’ tends to conjure photos of hotkey talents and cooldown timers. But Awakening’s primary play appears to have a much more tangible high quality to it. Your useful resource scanner solely works in a small space at floor stage, however you possibly can climb mountains and rocky outcrops to carry out bigger environmental surveys. It additionally reveals off some nifty traversal mechanics, like a grappling hook and the “suspensor belt”, which helps you to hover over the bottom.
Finally, the trailer supplies a glimpse of considered one of Dune Awakening’s most attention-grabbing ideas, its Coriolis Storms. Designed to mirror how deserts change because the climate sculpts their dunes anew, these huge sandstorms will happen within the recreation’s PvP ‘deep deserts’, utterly reshaping these areas to uncover new sources and factors of curiosity on a weekly foundation.
Through this, Funcom goals for the deep deserts to supply “infinite exploration”. The trailer additionally implies these storms won’t simply be an summary map wipe, however precise in-game techniques that you can drive (or fly your ornithopter) by means of. Presumably, taking such a threat will assist you to get first dibs on all these recent goodies, although that is purely my very own interpretation.
You can watch the total trailer above. PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens bought hands-on with Dune Awakening in the beginning of the 12 months, and was impressed by how the sport derived primarily from the Dune fiction, moderately than grafting Herbert’s world onto a regular survival template.
“The exploration, the RPG components, the fight. It was there to serve the characterisation of Arrakis, not the opposite manner round,” he wrote again in January. We’re nonetheless but to see how its higher-level faction techniques and participant politics will work, but it surely will not be lengthy earlier than we discover out, as the sport launches on May 20.
