Today, Funcom announced that a large scale beta weekend (with no NDA) for Dune: Awakening will take place between Friday, May 9 and Monday, May 12, allowing a significant number of players to try the game ahead of the new launch date of June 10. Fans can attempt to get in by requesting access via the game’s Steam page. However, those who aren’t lucky enough to be automatically invited may still obtain a code by watching the Global LAN Party Broadcast, which will be broadcast live from both London and PAX East. Funcom said tens of thousands of beta codes will be given away during the stream.
As you may have guessed by the article’s headline, Funcom provided select press outlets, including ourselves, with advanced access to this beta build. Content-wise, this is the same thing you’ll be playing in the upcoming public weekend: there are around twenty to twenty-five hours of gameplay, featuring the Hagga Basin South Region, the Eastern and Western Vermilius Gap Region, and parts of the story’s first Act.
These first few hours are, perhaps unsurprisingly, almost entirely devoted to the survival and building aspects of Dune: Awakening. After character creation, where the player is given the choice of their starting skill tree, home planet, and background (noble or working class, for example), the Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit tasks you with a not-so-simple objective: head to Arrakis and find the surviving Fremen, who have been reportedly slaughtered by the Sardaukar, the Emperor’s elite military force. The journey immediately starts to get complicated when the airship is shot down by a rocket launcher, leaving your character stranded in the desert with practically nothing on them. Thankfully, a mysterious character provides help and guidance through the very first part of the journey.
At this stage, it’s all about surviving. First and foremost, there’s the need to keep hydrated. This is Arrakis, after all, and water is the second most precious commodity after spice. Initially, you must gather dew from the few plants you’ll encounter, though that kind of hydration can only fill you up a little. You also have to collect other resources, such as copper and metal, to create a variety of tools that can help you craft new items for your character and your base. To establish your property, you must first place a subfief console, which in turn lets you start building the base’s foundation, walls, doors, roof, etc. Of course, some areas are off limits, but even the initial map is quite large and offers many places where building is allowed.
Eventually, you’ll build a weak version of the iconic stillsuit, which helps greatly with water management. You’ll also get access to a blood extractor that can be used to exsanguinate defeated foes. Blood can be consumed as is if you’re desperately out of liquids, but that can make you sick. The ideal process is to bring it back to base and process it through a water purifier first.
You’ll also need to pay a lot of care to sunlight exposure. When the sun is up and you’re out in the open, a meter will quickly fill to urge you to the shadows. If the meter is filled, water starts depleting even faster. The game has a dynamic day and night cycle, so you’ll only have to worry about this factor during daytime; however, the desert is patrolled by Sardaukar drones at nighttime. You’ll want to avoid them at all costs.
The last big environmental challenge is, of course, the sandworm. This is arguably the biggest threat early on in Dune: Awakening; whenever you cross the open sands, and depending on your current speed, there’s a risk of alerting the deadly creature. Whenever that happens, players must rush to the nearest rocky ground – being swallowed by the sandworm also means irrevocably losing whatever was in your inventory (on the other hand, in PvE maps, dying by other means lets you rush back to your corpse to retrieve the dropped items).
Admittedly, I died a couple of times because of the sandworm, but it eventually became less of a bother, especially after I built my first sandbike. This is a fairly involved process of assembling various components, but it is well worth it. It’s a massive improvement in your ability to travel the hostile game world that also offers no fast travel options, at least at this stage. Exploration feels good, at any rate, also thanks to the free-climbing (you can attempt to climb any surface, provided you’ve got enough stamina to make it to the top) feature, the shigawire claw (essentially a grappling hook), and the suspensor belt that lets you glide down without taking any fall damage.
Of course, Dune: Awakening also features a lot of combat. Melee is a big part of fights in this game, and there’s a full gamut of actions available here, from blocking to dodging, from regular attacks to charged attacks. You can also equip three active abilities and three passive techniques from your skill trees.
At least in this beta, though, enemy variety was practically nonexistent. They’re all ruthless (and nameless) killers and scavengers, hiding in the nooks and crannies of the desert or inside proper bases. In my explorations of the Hagga Basin map (which, interestingly, also resets its points of interest every once in a while due to Coriolis sandstorms like the Deep Desert PvP map), I also found the botanical testing stations that Funcom previously discussed. Based on their description, I thought they’d be group dungeons, but at least the first one was just a regular soloable base without any boss-like encounters. They do have great loot and a few audio recordings for lore aficionados.
Eventually, you’ll run into the first outposts with NPCs that can provide you with contracts or even ask you to join their faction (for now, just Atreides or Harkonnen). There are a few missions here and there, but Dune: Awakening is not a game you’ll play for the story. At its core, it is instead a survival sandbox crafting game like many others, albeit well-tailored to the Dune setting. What could truly set it apart from the veritable sea of such games is the MMO-like endgame part, where players form clans and join either Atreides and Harkonnen in a cyclic war for control of Arrakis and its spice, with potentially hundreds of players participating in large scale battles featuring combined arms warfare with ornithopters, buggies, and the ever-present threat of the sandworm to all parties. However, this was not in the beta, so we’ll have to wait until launch before properly assessing the game.
Lastly, a few words about performance. The game is powered by Unreal Engine 5 and can look pretty at times, even though its Lumen global illumination is not accelerated with hardware ray tracing. The announced NVIDIA DLSS Multi Frame Generation is not yet available in the game, but the really worrying aspect is that even on a high-end PC (RTX 5090, Ryzen 7 9800X3D), stuttering was a constant presence during my play sessions.
I didn’t measure it with software because Funcom may still be in the middle of optimizing the game. In fact, it could be the major reason behind the small delay from May 20 to June 10. Having said that, you can clearly see all the stutters in the gameplay video embedded above. Let’s hope they can significantly improve optimization in these last few weeks.
