Games

A masterpiece of interwoven designs, the game Dune: Awakening – which proposes an alternative timeline to the famous books – is hauntingly beautiful. By Katherine Cross.

Dune: Awakening is a hauntingly beautiful RPG

The much-awaited Dune: Awakening.

Credit: Funcom

The moment I assembled my ornithopter and took off into the afternoon desert sun was, hands down, one of the most glorious moments of flight I’ve ever had in a video game. Then I turned the wings off and was treated to gliding. After hours of struggle – beginning this game by guzzling droplets of dew off plants just to stay upright and surviving bands of scavengers by shivving them – I had crash-landed on the unforgiving sands of Arrakis and survived long enough to fly.

Welcome to Funcom’s Dune: Awakening, a… well, we’ll get to what genre it is in a second, as it’s a surprisingly vexed question. In short, this is a role-playing game (RPG) with survival mechanics and strong narrative elements. It is an always-online multiplayer, involves lots of resource gathering and crafting and most strongly rewards those who band together in guilds. If this walks and quacks like a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, well, just be careful who you say that around.

Whenever a game has an identity crisis in the weeks after launch, it heralds either glory or death for its world. Dune: Awakening is, most obviously, in the MMORPG genre, but the developers, and even some players, are at pains to avoid calling it an MMO. Instead, it’s marketed as a “multiplayer survival game”. Partly because the “massively” bit could, in some lights, appear to be a false promise. Dune: Awakening is, for both practical and thematic reasons, an empty world.

Most of the game takes place in the variegated realms of the Hagga Basin, with biomes ranging from “sand” to “red sand” to “bad sand” that eats your sandbike to “canyons and sand” to “cactuses and sand” to “spicy sand”. It’s spicy because it’s radioactive. There is genuine diversity in all these regions, which ensures you always know where you are from a quick look around. It’s a triumph of design in a game filled with them, and one more flourish on the authoring of a world that strives to re-create Frank Herbert’s bleak vision of feudalism and doomed revolution.

Funcom’s team is devoted to lore accuracy. To that end, it wouldn’t make sense to have the Hagga Basin filled with thousands of people running around building private bases until it looked like some new subdivision of Perth. Each server is further subdivided into “sietches” (named for the collective dwellings of the Arrakis-native Fremen) to ensure that every server has dozens of instances of Hagga Basin to keep its player population as low as possible.

For a game where building your own base is a critical goal, this is sensible. It also means this is not a massive experience. Don’t expect a 40-strong raid on the sandworm.

In fact, don’t expect to confront the sandworm at all. The reality is that Shai-Hulud – bless the coming and going of him – is there to humble you. No matter how powerful you become, that worm can and will eat you and every single thing you’re carrying.

This is where the game sings, often literally. The survival mechanics are not as intense as devotees of the genre may be used to – The Long Dark this ain’t – but Funcom balances approachability and challenge. Arrakis is supposed to be dangerous and barely inhabitable.

Whenever you wander onto open sand you hear a brilliant, foreboding musical sting that intensifies as Shai-Hulud approaches, its nearness measured by the seismometer that quivers into an angry red the closer the worm comes. It makes every traversal of the sands feel genuinely dangerous: close encounters will get your heart racing at any level and the stakes are as high as whatever you’re carrying. Or driving. The worm will eat your sand buggy, or even your ornithopter, if you fly too low at the wrong time.

So where is the RPG aspect? Aside from gaining levels in Dune disciplines such as Mentat or Bene Gesserit, there’s a story that, as these things go in MMOs, is quite strong. It surfaces elements that were in the background of Herbert’s first book, putting them centrestage in a compelling conspiracy. Funcom achieves this with one neat trick that represents their only departure from canon: in this universe, Paul Atreides was never born.

Setting the game in an alternate universe is brilliant: it allows this story to breathe deep of its spice melange. It also makes your character concomitantly more important. There is no charismatic JFK stand-in to rapture away all the world-historical importance. The universe is more chaotic and you step into that breach to leave your mark.

Everything about this game is beautiful. It is, in places, a masterpiece of interwoven designs. From the art on the codex entries, to the UI, to the aesthetics of large swathes of the world, to the haunting music of Knut Avenstroup Haugen. If good music is atmospheric, his embodies the low dread of a distant haboob on the horizon; sometimes literally. You know when a deadly sandstorm has entered the map because of a music cue.

Despite Funcom’s best efforts to run from the idea, this is an MMO – if a more micrological one – and it means that there will be an eternity of bugs and unfused joins. Melee combat, which becomes more essential as time goes on, is abysmal. It has a logic to it; you have to use a slow-blade attack to penetrate your opponent’s shield. Lore accurate! But the fight to get there is so lacking in rhythm that you’ll never have to worry about attracting a sandworm. It’s button-mashy and chaotic in a way that leaves you fighting the controls rather than an opponent.

I haven’t even mentioned the Deep Desert, the endgame zone where this is all headed. Frank Herbert’s Dune is a cruel, cynical world. Most charitably, it was his warning about the dangers of a charismatic ruler’s power. Most realistically, it was a cynical take on the human condition; we will always be condemned to be our worst selves, individually and collectively. The Deep Desert’s PVP zone embodies this theme of Herbert’s Dune more than anything else in the game; Funcom is struggling to keep up with the rate of player exploits and cheats, of toxic behaviour and various unintentional uses of game design, all as the game’s highest-level players make each other miserable by blowing up each other’s ornithopters or feeding each other to Shai-Hulud while they try to mine the game’s richest spice fields.

This is many things; thematic is certainly one of them.

At the moment, there’s little to do in the endgame beyond mine the most advanced resources and peek into some challenging ruins and wrecks – and/or gank someone in PVP. Time will tell if this keeps people around or whether the game will, like the Deep Desert every week, be swallowed by the dunes.

Funcom should embrace the game’s heritage as an MMO. For its flaws, it’s the most exciting thing to happen in this space in years. Even World of Warcraft’s heir, Final Fantasy XIV, is getting long in the tooth at more than a decade old. For various reasons, mostly due to avaricious C-suites, the genre has languished. With its unique blend of survival mechanics and design flourishes, this highly literate MMO could be a desperately needed shot in the arm for the genre. Funcom should accept what it is and make that endgame more collaborative, richer and pacier.

Otherwise, that classic Dune cynicism is waiting to swallow the game whole beneath the sands, as if nothing beautiful had been there at all.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 16, 2025 as "Sand blaster".

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