Dune Awakening: Apotheosis

I’ve made it through the DLC and got my treadwheel.

I take it everywhere. You can put it in your pocket — using the vehicle backup tool — and pop it out anywhere. Want to run to the base next door? Treadwheel. Need to collect some bristle brush? Treadwheel. Stuck in the middle of the deep desert and need to get to that rock island over there and you’re hearing weird worm noises echoing around?

Treadwheel.

Mine is black with glowy bits. It has a scanner in the front and a boot in the back. It can climb like anything. It spins around whenever it catches air. It feels like it goes faster than an ornithopter, but it doesn’t. It can’t outrun a sandworm, but nothing can outrun one on the ground.

I’ve written about the DLC plot before, but there was a free chapter that continues your personal story.

And the stupid thing is, I can’t talk about it, because it is full of spoilers. Tell you what. I’ll see if I can block the spoilers.

See, you’re not just some random prisoner — you’re a ghola, an artificial person created from a corpse. I hope that worked. That was where the first chapter of your story ended, with that revelation. All along, you were special. It answered the question, what are you, but didn’t answer the most important question, who are you?

Unfortunately, chapter two doesn’t answer that question — not directly. It hints about it. In a previous life, they say, you were famous, and everyone would know your name. The clear implication is that you were someone known as the Sleeper. Someone who has to be shocked out of their normal existence to awaken and reach their full potential. In game terms, you, as the Sleeper, will awaken — remembering your previous life — and then?

The bulk of the quest deals with the aftermath of the destruction of Old Carthag, a city on Arrakis. The official story is that someone jerk was playing with a shield and an unmodified lasgun and blowed up the city, killing everyone.

In the previous chapter, we learned that it was no accident, and more than that, it was anticipated.

Several nobles escaped, and took all their best treasures. And someone planned the whole thing. All these people are turning up dead. And you have been ordered by your keeper to look into it. Why you? Because you cannot say no.

(Or can you? I was wondering if it was possible to just live in the Deep Desert and the social hubs without ever setting foot into the Hagga Basin — a Sleeper without a Server, a ghost in the machine).

But, at least if you want to continue the story, you are compelled to track down all the dead people and the possible suspects and solve the mystery of what really happened to Old Carthag. As reward, Lady Jessica’s daughter, Ariste, the girl who was born instead of Paul Atreides, offers to sneak you into the Atreides family estate and let you access the super secret Bene Gesserit archives which are, for some reason, copied into a special scriptorium a thousand meters down.

If you’ve finished the DLC story, it should be no surprise what you find down there. As Ariste says to you, the Bene Gesserit don’t really believe rules apply to them.

I don’t want to spoil anything. But after the revelations in chapter two, I Have Questions. I somehow don’t think they will ever answer the question of who you are, because that would imply, I think, that all your memories would come back and then your happy fun time living in the basin and kicking about in the Deep Desert would be pretty much over. Also, someone would probably want to kill you… again.

It has been a fun week in the Deep Desert.

Stingite and Calrain took our new crawler out into the deep desert, and Stingite, all of his gear, and the crawler were all eaten by a worm after Cal accidentally tabbed out of the game by hitting the Windows key. Cal then spent the next 24 hours madly harvesting and crafting to get everyone made good again. I gave him some hell about it, all in fun.

Later, we went out again. Sting and Cal both left their gear behind; I went up above in a scout to… well, scout, but also to keep an eye out for worms. We got over 20K spice in a few minutes, then went back out and got more the next day. We now have a lot of spice and a lot of plastanium.

We had time left over to play the Landsraad, too. I think we ended this week at third place again. Part of the issue is that once a faction member claims a deep desert control point, it can’t be reclaimed by anyone on that faction until it passes through enemy hands first.

So we came up with a crazy idea to all make second Steam accounts and use Family Sharing so that we could make Harkonnen alts on our server. Then we could flip to Hark and then immediately flip it back to Atreides, but now it would be us that got the credit.

We tried it! And it didn’t work. Funcom knows about Family Sharing, and have disabled it. We’d have to cough up another $50 each to try, and it’s just not worth it.

I had a vision when I started the game of being in the Deep Desert, flying in a squadron of ornithopters, harvesting the spice as a team. Just living the Dune life. And it’s real, and it happened, and honestly, I am not sure what more I can expect from the game at this point. Our server is small, and the hub to which we belong is quiet. Our auction house is empty. There is no competition for spice; plenty of room for everyone and we rarely see anyone we don’t know out and about. If there were more people, then the Deep Desert would feel more like a beginning than an ending, but it is what it is. Funcom plans to add a third faction to upset the one-sided Atreides domination on most servers, and maybe that will spark new life.

It seems unlikely. Without a way to connect our server to a more active hub, or a way to just transfer to a new server, I’m not sure what the future holds. With nothing much to buy, money is worthless. Without competition for spice and resources, we are getting all we can use.

I think we’ve peaked.