Mates, I’ve consumed a lifechanging quantity of mind-altering substances and lowered 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 last 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 in the present day.
Dune: Awakening hits PC on Could 20 this 12 months for $50, with console launch dates but to return. For some purpose—in all probability due to my Pavlovian response to something beneath the ‘survival’ rubric—I maintain considering of the sport’s launch as an early entry factor, however that is not proper. Could 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 exhibits 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 Warfare of Assassins. Your ship crashes, a fella in a stillsuit helps you out, and off you go constructing your self a bit of residence, losing scavengers, and plundering dungeons for assets.
In case you’ve not been following this one, maybe you since you share my kneejerk lack of curiosity in issues each ‘survival’ and ‘MMO,’ I might 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 go away 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. Additionally I made a bit of bald Harkonnen fella who was simply absolutely the weirdest form of freak.
Although I did not get hands-on time with later-game stuff, Funcom makes that sound fairly intriguing as properly. As soon as you’ve got received the fundamentals of survival down, the sport strikes into the political realm, with you and no matter participant faction you’ve got signed as much as manoeuvring within the Landsraad (Dune’s space-parliament) to safe legal guidelines and procedures that aid you out and screw over your enemies. If the studio pulls that off, I anticipate some EVE On-line-style political insanity as gamers concoct grand schemes to stab each other within the again.
