Dune Awakening is a truly massive survival MMO, and it manages to make sandworms the terror they should be

Dune: Awakening has been a long time coming, and it looks like it's got a long way to go still. There's no word yet on even a prospective release date, and the recent gameplay demonstration I attended at Summer Game Fest was strictly hands-off. Yet even in an early state, this survival MMO managed to impress me. It's very much a product of its genre, but one that builds on familiar mechanics to smartly integrate them with franchise lore. It's also astoundingly big.

As a survival game, Dune: Awakening works just as you'd imagine – seek out resources and try not to die. Death will drop some of your equipment's durability, and you'll lose half of whatever inventory stacks you've got. That is unless you get eaten by the sandworm, which causes you to lose everything. An onscreen sound meter will help you keep track of when the worm is likely to show up, giving you a chance to avoid it, but I'm very into the idea of Dune's most iconic idea being a source of so much additional risk.

The scope of the game is the part that impressed me most. Covering the vast distances of the Arrakis desert requires liberal use of vehicles like ornithopters to get around, and the 64 square kilometer map features plenty of both vertical and horizontal space to explore. There's something a bit like Halo in here – the action feels intimate while you're on foot, but suddenly you jump into something with wings and you're playing a much different game at a much different scale.

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Wormsign

During the demo, a developer went from open desert fighting NPC enemies down through a resource-stuffed cavern and out into a small shipwreck in the space of a few minutes. The main map is largely PvE with a selection of PvP zones, and it supports 40 players. The idea is that you'll go into specific PvP-enabled locations, like shipwrecks and testing stations, that are essentially dungeons. Here's where you'll compete against other players for a limited selection of special loot such as unique weapon schematics.

So you have to delve into one of these locations to get, say, the schematics for an explosive semi-automatic rifle. That schematic lasts for one build, so once that weapon breaks, you've got to go back to the loot location and get the schematic again. That should help keep funneling players into conflict with each other throughout the game. The devs were quick to note that if you're not into PvP, you could theoretically just avoid these areas, hanging out in the larger PvE zones to gather materials and craft while your friends do the dangerous work.

If you head out past the edge of the current map, you'll be taken to a top-down overland map, which is essentially a fancy in-world menu that lets you move to another instance. This is how you'll get to the deep desert, which is the endgame PvP location that supports hundreds upon hundreds of players on a map that's nine times bigger than the standard one.

The demo was a whirlwind tour of the game's biggest features, and I still don't have a great feel for how it all actually fits together, what the moment-to-moment action feels like, and how engaging all those endgame mechanics will be over the long term. But even with that in mind, I was extremely impressed by the scope and variety of what I saw during this short demo. If it can make good on all this promise, Dune: Awakening is poised to be a top-tier survival MMO, and a fitting adaptation of an iconic franchise.

Check out our Dune: Imperium - Uprising review if you're looking to do your Dune gaming at the tabletop.