You don’t play Dune: Awakening for the story, or at least, not just for the story. You play because you can fly ornithopters around and dodge sandworms. Well, that’s why I play, anyway.
But, that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the story. In a nutshell, you start the game as an agent of the Imperium aided by the Bene Gesserit to go to Arrakis (disguised as a prisoner) and find out what happened to the Fremen people who were assumed to have been wiped out by the Harkonnen and Imperial Sardauker forces, since in this timeline, they did not have Paul Atreides there to lead them to victory.
Along the way, you find out that nobody is who they seem to be. Not even you. Not even especially you. Finding out who you are was the focus of the first two chapters of the story. And I am a little upset that you didn’t find anything about your origins in this third chapter that you didn’t already know. Maybe now you know a little more about the real game being played out among the various factions on and off Arrakis, but for yourself, nothing new. I have suspicions, but I can’t say them here because spoilers.
Nope, not going to explain that screenshot. You’ll just have to play the game.
Chapter 3 introduced a whole lot of PvE content, so much so that nobody in our guild has bothered with the Deep Desert since the expansion dropped. There is just so much PvE content now. They added dungeons with adjustable difficulty, and they really work. They added a whole new crafting system and a bunch of things to craft. They added augments. They added a bunch of new skill trees that operate in parallel with the skill trees they already had. Doing the dungeons and the new open world areas gives you Landsraad faction and rewards, and also build experience in the new skill trees.
It really is a whole new game. If they’d had all this when the game first launched, well… they should try to manage a relaunch at some point, bring back all the people who had a bad experience the first time.
I really have to be super careful with my screenshots. This popup from the end of the chapter mentions building faction with Duke Leto (for the Atreides) or Beast Rabban (for the Harkonnen).
The game added new faction levels — previous maximum was five, current is twenty, and you gain faction by running dungeons. There’s also a new quest goal to run dungeons at difficulty levels 20 and 30. The most I’ve attempted, in a group, was 14, and the boss just wiped us out again and again. I know there’s people out there who have completed difficulty level 20 and up, but that seems far away. And far down the new skill trees, as your stats and gear are going to have to be pretty extreme to manage these.
On my own, I’ve only done up to level 3 solo, and even then I do it with prescience active. I’m so spicy now that drinking even the most powerful spice coffee barely gives me a buzz, so I have to lay off it for awhile, wait for the tolerance to back off.
Geez, I sound like a junkie.
I also got a cool pair of burning blades from the fire dungeon. Dual Blades are tight.
You probably ARE Theseus, as I’m sure you’ve replaced all the parts of your ornithopter more than once.
Oh probably at least once 🙂