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Sandworms are the spice in Dune: Awakening’s otherwise quite familiar survival simmingHow the worm turns
How the worm turns
Image credit:Funcom
Image credit:Funcom
When Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, I’m pretty sure he didn’t envisage the rise of a species of videogame, thesurvivalsim, which would one day itself suffer an unsustainable population explosion during the layoff-ridden years of 2023 and 2024. What does it take to survive as a survival sim, in these days when every other game seems to be a survival sim? What separates the fit from the extinct? If you’rePalworld, the answer is gleefullyborrowingandtravestyingmonster concepts from a celebrated Nintendo series. If you’reEnshrouded, it’s all about havinga really neat building system. And if you’reDune: Awakening, the next game fromConan Exilesdeveloper Funcom, the trick may lie with sandworms.
I caught a preview of this latest adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novels at GDC last week, and came away surprisingly enthused about a game you could ungenerously characterise as a giant, orange-brown map with overly punitive thirst and temperature mechanics and more-or-less the same construction and crafting rhythms we see in every other survival game under the Arrakeen sun. Sandworms? They break things up a bit, which is to say, they burst through the desert and swallow you like plankton. I can take or leave a lot of what I’ve seen of Dune Awakening, if I’m honest, but the idea of playing hide and seek with a mapwide, burrowing monster while racing other players to gather the all-important spice melange is absolutely a prospect I can get behind.
Image credit:Funcom
Your character can wield three active abilities at once, with combat following a rock-paper-scissors balance between ranged and melee builds, involving gadgets such as flying, motion-sensitive Hunter Seeker drones. There’s also “magic” in the shape of Mentat abilities that allow you to (for example) mathematically model the presence of enemies through walls. Base-building sees you placing a hologram, then filling it in, which means you can lay out a plan for yourself and collaborators before committing the resources, as inNightingale. There are NPC hubs with opportunities for training and trading, and “dungeons” in the form of abandoned eco laboratories beneath the planet’s surface. These are designed to last around 15 minutes, and are obviously where some of the juiciest raw materials are found.
It all feels quite cut-and-dried, indeed, massively dehydrated, and some of the elements lifted from the Dune books and films feel more like visual flourishes modded into a non-licensed sci-fi MMO. I was especially disappointed to find that Funcom haven’t tried to recreate the bizarrely unintuitive process of melee combat in a universe where personal forceshields stop incoming objects that are travelling above a certain speed, though I’m sure it would have been an utter nightmare to implement, even in an offline simulation. Instead, combat appears to hinge on relatively straightforward gambits like using a knee charge to close the gap and chaining attacks to build a multiplier.
Image credit:Funcom
A couple of other standout bits: 1) you can equip a grappling hook and suspensor technology to sort of transform the game intoJust Cause- zipping to the summit of a rock outcrop in order to perform drop kills on players below, then latching onto a friendly ornithopter and letting it carry you away into the sunset. 2) You’ll have to worry about sandstorms, which drop visibility to nothing and swiftly shred any vehicles caught in their embrace. If you’ve grappled onto an ornithopter and it pilots merrily into a sandstorm, your best bet is to detach with prejudice and find a crevice to wedge yourself into.
Image credit:Funcom
Funny stuff, potentially. But the aspect of Dune Awakening that really makes me drop my pen and assume the brace position is the presence of sandworms. These vast, subterranean creatures are present everywhere in the world, sending up huge clouds of grit as they burrow about. Rather than being a kind of all-pervading, escalating terrain hazard akin to, say, the Eye of Sauron in certain Lord Of The Rings adaptations, they’re actual NPC monsters with their own whims and territories, and a dynamic list of things they want to track down and eat. They also come in several sizes: the largest ‘grandfather’ worms are capable of downing entire processions of vehicles in a single gulp.
Image credit:Funcom
The belated characterisation I’m reaching for here is: what if Dune Awakening were not, in fact, a survival MMO, but an extremely distant cousin ofHunt: Showdown- an expansive, sweaty bout of player-versus-player-versus-boss, where a dozen or more harvesting teams strive to turn the neighbourhood worm against each other? I really like the sound of that, and that’s without taking into account Funcom’s plans to let you ride the worms at some point after launch, which will surely be the absolute mother of all PvP balancing headaches. As and when Dune Awakening launches - there’s norelease dateyet - I suspect I’m going to give minimal attention to the well-travelled base-building and crafting elements, and simply offer my services as outrider to any players planning a massive spice raid.
