Dune Awakening: Packing up the base for good.

If you play a few MMOs, you get a pretty good idea of what the game loop is going to be. Choose your class. Learn your way around the game. Make some friends. Join a guild that fits your playstyle. Because, someday, your guild will meet the big boss, win, and get amazing loot. It’s not going to be easy, but you’ll be feeling pretty good when it finally happens and you start to get ready for the next boss, or maybe try it with another character. Meanwhile, gonna look pretty with all that loot dripping from you when you go stepping out in the city.

The weird thing about Dune: Awakening, as an MMO, is that it really has none of these things.

At its heart, D:A is a survival crafting game. You start with nothing, always on the verge of dying not to enemies, but to the environment, just trying to survive. Slowly, you get armor, weapons, buffs, and go out to take on… the same enemies, but harder.

It was Funcom’s idea that fighting the cookie-cutter enemies (heavies, snipers, and melee are the only three types) would just be what you’d grind to face the true threat — other players. But on the server on which I played, which was a private server full of people who were friends and acquaintances, there was utterly no PvP. It would be unthinkable. (Life was very different on some public servers from what I understand). Then we would graduate to the Deep Desert and have pitched battles over spice, I guess, from then on. Or in the deep desert labs, PvP-only dungeons that held the blueprints for the best gear and the rare ingredient required to build it, Plastanium Dust.

So someone would work their way through it, and then ambush anyone that followed. Or follow behind a group and then just steal the winnings. These things actually did happen on our server cluster, but that just made people pissed off enough to stop playing. If this is your endgame, it’s pretty weak.

But that wasn’t the actual endgame! The actual endgame was taking control points in the Deep Desert and holding them! This would get you faction that you could spend for certain gear, but most importantly, deciding what the server-wide buff for the next week would be! Cheaper crafting? Increased melee damage?

It was pretty low stakes.

That all changed with the 3.0 patch that replaced the endgame with skill grinds and PvE, instanced dungeons. Doing them with friends was fun, but doing them solo became an exciting challenge. The idea here was: Grind dungeons to get the materials for better gear so that you could grind higher level instances to get the materials for better gear so that you could etcetera. Getting better gear to keep doing the things you were already doing, but harder, was the new endgame.

Now, Funcom is going to essentially get rid of PvP entirely. Still no word on whether there will be anything worth grinding for.

I should mention the story — there is a story, and this story contains boss fights that can be a real challenge, or at least they were a real challenge for me. Significantly, these are solo-only events, and they don’t drop blueprints or mats. This would have been a great excuse for raids or even groups, but it seems nothing you do is allowed to impact the world in any real way. At the end of the day, you were always just a tool for some power or other.

I’m making it sound like these were reasons I’m probably quitting soon. They aren’t, not really. I just wanted to go into detail on how Dune: Awakening really fails as an MMO (but does okay as a solo survival crafting game).

Harkonnen by blood, Atreides by choice.

Let’s make a list, least to most important:

• The endgame is just a circular grind. Yeah, but it’s fun to be challenged and doing it with friends is a lot of fun — and a lot more challenging.
• GPortal’s server hosting is rancid. We know it’s GPortal and not the game itself, because we’re not hearing outrage over not being able to zone into dungeons, or bugging out, or sitting waiting for an hour only to finally get to zone in somewhere and play the game.
• Friends left. These games are the most fun with friends. Right now, it’s just Calrain and I. We’ve moved servers once, and…
• We’re going to have to move servers again. Due to GPortal being so terrible, the guild is fleeing GPortal for a non-GPortal hosted server to join a guild that previously left GPortal. Cal and I and anyone else who came over from Scopique’s server are welcome to go and see if, with more people, the world can for once feel alive.
• Because of the previous, the server we are currently on is going to shut down in less than a month. If we don’t leave by then, we could lose all our stuff. (Funcom has already given the ability to pack up the base entire into a droppable object; just have to disassemble the vehicles and pack them away first. We all did this to transfer to the current server; worked fine). Addendum to that: since we started on a private server, public servers are forever closed to us. We grew up in a world where we didn’t have to pay taxes and there was a lesser penalty for dying. We also faced no danger of PvP while leveling up. And so, we’re pariahs. So it’s move or die.
• But the real reason is, without a real goal to work toward, and without a good handful of friends to share the experience with, it’s just a solo game. At almost 500 hours of playtime, most of which was me actually doing stuff, I have given it my best, seen all there is to see, met every single personal goal I had for the game. I am just done. Ardullan Online, EverQuest Legends, and many other games are out there and I don’t want to miss them.

I was always going to leave Dune: Awakening at some point. I had a lot of fun, but being forced to move or quit, well, it sounds like a really good time to quit. There are other worlds to conquer. Maybe when they drop the next chapter, I’ll spin up a self-hosted server or (yikes) give GPortal a month of my money and see what’s up. Maybe I’ll even try to join whoever is left at the new server. But for now, I’m finishing up Pokopia, there’s Erenshor to work on again, EQLegends to try to bargain my way into, etc.

Dune, I’ll always remember my first hours flying an ornithopter. I will never forget the scary thrill of being alone in a spice harvester while Calrain flew a carrier above me, both of us keenly aware that at any second, a sandworm — or someone in an assault ‘thopter — could swoop in to ruin our day. I can’t forget Stingite’s hilarious puzzles he left in the Deep Desert. Those were really fun. There were good times, and I don’t regret my time in D:A, not at all.

It is just a good time to move on.