When I think Dune, I think long treatises on politics and philosophy, dramatic knife fights, hands melting in mind torture boxes, Sting in a speedo with glistening abs, and, of course, giant toothy sandworms. I think about the striking scale and imagination of each and every adaptation of Dune over the years, from illustrated novels to David Lynch and Denis Villeneuve’s films to the Dune Bible from the unmade Jodorowsky’s Dune.
What I don’t think of are small, square granite hovels, which is pretty much all I saw in a few hours of playing Dune: Awakening’s beta last week.
As my colleague Chris Livingston wrote, a lot of Dune: Awakening’s survival game elements mesh quite well with the sci-fi universe. Thirst is a perfect survival mechanic on a desert planet, and being able to drink the water out of the bodies of your enemies? Excellent. Fleeing in terror from the worms that patrol the barren gulfs between zones? Riveting. But starting off building shelters with Dune’s equivalent of sticks and rocks in a game like Ark? Ehh, I’m not quite sure how well that fits.
Take a look at a few player bases from the beta:
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Even that last one, which has quite a cool design, is still built of uniform gray blocks, with little cosmetic variety when it comes to colors, windows, angled roofs, different sized walls and foundations, and so on.
Meanwhile, in Villeneuve’s Dune, scale and texture turn giant slabs of stone into far more evocative buildings.
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And that’s Dune art at its most grounded; thanks to my dad indoctrinating me with David Lynch’s Dune when I was a kid, I have to admit my mind goes to scenes like these when I imagine what Dune should look like.
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When you first start out basebuilding in Dune: Awakening, you’re limited to just a few basic wall and foundation pieces and a limited amount of space you can build in. The building tools themselves are passable, but coming from my hundreds of hours in Satisfactory I felt immediately constrained by, well, pretty much everything: the speed at which I could swap between pieces, the keybinds for swapping between building and erasing and flipping walls around. What do you mean I can’t lay down a chunk of eight wall tiles or floor pieces at a time? Do I really need to scroll through a horizontal UI instead of quickly mashing a hotkey to swap between similar pieces or pluck one from a nice radial menu?
Satisfactory is a special case, though, a game wholly dedicated to building things that got years of refinement in early access. It’s a high bar. But I also immediately flashed back to the last proper survival game I played, Grounded, which had more intuitive building controls and, at least at first blush, much more “fun” aesthetics in line with its setting.
I don’t think Dune: Awakening’s beta was a great representation of the building options players will have in the full game. There are clearly unlockable building blocks that allow for differently shaped structures and decorations that will give these barren bases a bit more panache. This video from YouTuber TotalXclipse shows that even within the beta you could unlock enough interesting pieces to build more than a squared off bunker.
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If Dune: Awakening was a straight survival game, I think that demonstration would be enough to put my mind at ease. But just like Chris is digging the survival mechanics but not sold on the MMO half of Dune Awakening, I’m left wondering how many players in the final game will go deep on the building system when they can spend fewer resources and a whole lot less time just throwing up four straight walls and a flat ceiling and calling it a day. With hundreds (thousands?) of players on any given server, how much of the desert is going to be marred by the ugliest, laziest implementations of this architecture?
If it doesn’t look awesome from the jump—and if the building tools aren’t an absolute pleasure to use, the way they are in Satisfactory—how many players are going to reasonably decide it’s a bit of a bother?
I hope late-game Dune: Awakening lets players build in a variety of styles mined from the greater Dune fiction—it’d be really, really cool to see parts of the map dominated by imposing Harkonnen architecture and others anchored by the elegance of Atreides or the opulence of the emperor’s House Corrino. That kind of variety would go a long way towards bringing the Dune universe to life on Awakening’s Arrakis.
Failing that, Awakening better at least give me the option to carry a pug into battle.
