Dune: Awakening is a mix of genres
Dune: Awakening is an open world, multiplayer, survival game on a massive scale, with content and mechanics you haven’t seen in combination before.
Labels can be weird, especially when you’re making a game like this, and a while back we decided to drop “MMO” from our top-level, one-liner description. Many of you have been asking why, and the reason is simply that we saw expectations were veering too far into the classic MMORPG paradigm.
At its heart, Dune: Awakening is an open world survival crafting game, and while it has many typical MMO features – including the massively multiplayer aspect – it’s important to be clear about what the game is and isn’t.
But let’s take this opportunity to clarify further.
Survival open world crafting at the core
In Dune: Awakening, you’ll find tons of classic survival elements. Surviving the environment is a challenge. You need to stay hydrated, stay out of the sun and its scorching heat, and you need to manage environmental dangers like sandstorms and radiation.
It has resource management. You must harvest resources, process them, and use them to craft anything from armor to vehicles and weapons. Dune: Awakening, of course, also has spice.
Building is hugely important. You start by building a simple shelter, before unlocking crafting recipes that let you build towering fortresses. You need to manage power and ensure that you are protected from the destructive sandstorms.
It’s a sandbox (no pun intended). Nothing is level-gated, so if your friend wants to give you the best rifle in the game five minutes after you arrive on Arrakis – that’s fine. If you somehow obtain an ornithopter and manage to make your way to the Deep Desert in your first hour – good luck.
There is of course so much more that makes it a survival game, but anyone going into it will recognize many familiar mechanics – and some very new and unique ones.
Where Dune: Awakening goes beyond the classic survival formula
Dune: Awakening has you playing in a persistent world, shared with several hundred other players. It’s not single-player. It’s not just co-op. You’re not just playing on a small server with a few dozen players. Dune: Awakening goes beyond the typical survival game formula by introducing a large-scale multiplayer world and large-scale multiplayer mechanics. Beyond just player numbers, there are several mechanics in Dune: Awakening you will recognize from MMO games, but also other genres. Here are a few:- We have a slew of social gameplay features, from server-wide chats and proximity voice chat to players being able to form groups, open trade windows, and create guilds
- There is a World-wide (we’ll get to what Worlds are in a minute) trading feature fueled by the in-game Solari currency called the Exchange, where players across multiple servers can trade items. Think of it like auction houses you’ve seen in many MMOs
- There are social hubs, where players from many different servers in the same World can congregate to socialize, trade, pick up contracts, and talk to NPCs
- There are NPCs that you can talk to, with branching dialog trees, many which send you on missions that can be very similar to what you find in MMOs and other genres
- There are dungeons, what we call Imperial testing stations, that you can brave alone or with a group, offering both story and loot
- There is a multi-act, engaging storyline to follow, complete with in-game cutscenes, NPC dialog, and missions you’ll be sent on
- You can choose to join the Atreides or the Harkonnen, building up reputation with them that unlocks rewards such as unique crafting recipes and building pieces
- It offers more than just crafting progression, it also has multiple player archetypes (Schools of the Imperium), where you can mix and match different passive and active abilities
- Our goal has been to create a combat system that goes beyond what you can expect from survival open world crafting games, both in terms of quality and combat options, not to mention synergies between archetypes and their abilities
- There is an end game beyond just maxing out your progression and unlocking all the crafting recipes, opening a whole new gameplay loop
Player population, and server/world structure explained
When you first start playing Dune: Awakening, you pick a server that will be your home. Each of these servers belongs to a World and a World consists of at least 20 servers. As a player, you will meet and interact with players from other servers in your World. The best way to explain how this works is by looking at how our Arrakis is structured. Our Arrakis is made up of different and separate maps, some larger than others. You move between these maps on the Overland Map. Here are a few of the main ones:- Hagga Basin: This is where you start and where you will always return. The server you picked has one Hagga Basin map. It does not instance. Your server is basically your Hagga Basin, shared with several hundred other players, with up to 40 playing concurrently. It’s a big, persistent open world, similar in size to the map in Conan Exiles, and it consists of many different biomes. Here you must survive, build, and fight in the same space with other players who picked the same starting server as you.- It’s important to note that you can visit other Hagga Basin servers! You can do everything on the server you visit, except claim land. So, you can fight, progress, socialize, and even build on your friend’s or guild’s claimed land. - Hagga Basin is primarily PvE, with only a few small areas enabled for PvP.
- Social Hubs: These are settlements (Arrakeen and Harko Village) where players cannot build, drive vehicles, nor engage in PvP, but instead go to trade on the Exchange, talk to NPCs and pick up contracts, and of course socialize with other players. Here you will meet players from all the other servers (Hagga Basins) in your World. Once a social hub is full, an additional instance is spawned, similar to how it works in many MMOs.
- The Deep Desert: This is a massive, seamless, open space, several times larger than Hagga Basin. It is primarily a PvP map, with only a few smaller PvE areas. This is where players fight over control points and where battles will occur over massive spice blows. You’ll also find many different points of interest, including Imperial testing stations, promising new challenges and rewards. Once per week, a massive Coriolis Storm sweeps across the map, changing the locations of resources and points of interest, and players have to fly out to discover everything anew. - If you want to get technical about it, it consists of several maps seamlessly linked together, meaning you move across them seamlessly without loading. - While we are still fine-tuning the population for the Deep Desert, you can expect hundreds of players here, spread across its many points of interest. The Deep Desert is designed in such a way as to organically spread players across it, preventing all players from all huddling together in one small area. - You share one Deep Desert with all the other players across servers (Hagga Basins) in your World. So, once you leave your Hagga Basin, you can meet other players from your World either in the social hubs or the Deep Desert.
- Overland Map: As mentioned above, you can move between all these different maps through the Overland Map. Here, you fly an ornithopter on a top-down representation of the northern hemisphere of Arrakis and can fly from your Hagga Basin to a shared social hub or the Deep Desert. Movement on the Overland Map costs fuel and time costs water. As you fly around, you will see other players from your World who are also flying around.
There are other maps as well, but we’ll save those for you to discover!
This setup gives us incredible flexibility in both how we can expand after launch and how we can provide so many different gameplay mechanics.
Whereas most other survival games would tie a server to a specific map, and when an expansion launches, you would need to abandon your base/progress on one server to start fresh on a new one with the new map, we can simply add more maps that you can travel to from the Overland Map. This allows us to expand the game without ever having to force people to choose to abandon their home or their progress.
It also allows us to create a game that offers a mix of all these different gameplay mechanics. You have land claim and persistent building of bases in Hagga Basin, you have large-scale multiplayer with a constantly changing world in the Deep Desert, and you have the social hubs with all the options they offer. You can move between any of these, and you can even visit other people’s Hagga Basin servers to play with them.
To put it simply: this is survival on a massive scale.
Concerns regarding load and server queues
We’ve seen several comments expressing concerns about server load and queues. We certainly expect heavy loads at launch, and that is why we are preparing accordingly. Servers (Hagga Basins!) that fill up are impossible to completely avoid, same as with all games that operate with the populations Dune: Awakening does. But, rest assured, there will be thousands of servers grouped together in hundreds of Worlds available at launch. They will be spread out across the globe, offering low-latency connections in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia as illustrated in the image below. If we see that we’re nearing capacity, we will be able to spin up more. This is not our first rodeo, we’ve launched several MMOs and survival games over the past 25 years, and we have a robust set of tools and processes in place, managed by an experienced live operations team. What’s important to note is that while a Hagga Basin server can support 40 people playing concurrently, the way populations ebb and flow over the course of a day means that it still supports several hundred people picking that server as their home. This has been rigorously tested during closed beta, and we have systems in place that will restrict too many characters being created on a server that is becoming too popular, to minimize the chance of servers becoming full As with all games operating with populations like this, that doesn’t mean servers will never reach the 40-player concurrency cap. If that happens, you will join a server queue when logging in. The term “server queue” is rarely used in positive context – but to us it’s a quality-of-life addition. Commonly, survival games don’t offer this, and you are left having to wait and hope you are able to click fast enough when a slot opens up. By adding a server queue functionality, you can simply click once and rest easy knowing that you will get in when a slot becomes available to you. Again, because of how player populations ebb and flow throughout the day, you should not have to wait long before being let in.
Servers can be filtered by location as well as language, and you will be able to see which servers your Steam friends are playing on.
While transferring between servers or Worlds will not be available at launch, this is something we will introduce in a post-launch update as populations stabilize. Remember that you can visit friends on any server belonging to the same World your home server is in, and you can do everything – including building on a friend’s or a guild’s base – except claim land on a server that you are visiting. You can even create and join cross-server guilds.
We are still tweaking population limits on servers, Worlds, and maps to provide a smooth experience for everyone, and we have the flexibility to do so even after launch as we get an even more complete picture of how people play.
