As one of the first preview events of 2025, Funcom recently invited Wccftech out to their hometown of Oslo, Norway to take part in one of the first exclusive hands-on events for the upcoming survival multiplayer game, Dune Awakening. As part of a group of less than fifty influencers and journalists alike, we were permitted to experience the first four hours, beginning with character creation without guard rails.
Creative Director Joel Bylos started off the event by presenting a bit of Funcom’s vision for their take on Arrakis and the creative liberties they can work with. For inspiration, Dune Awakening is primarily built upon the first Frank Herbert’s books in the Dunology: Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. In working with an established Hollywood film series, there were some constraints that Funcom had to follow, including not being permitted to show Fremen in the game as Hollywood wanted to define how the Fremen looked, as well as keep a number of characters and plot points under wraps as not to unintentionally spoil Dune Part 3. As Joel succinctly put it, “constraints lead to freedom and [thinking] around corners”.
Funcom wanted to reiterate once again that Dune Awakening doesn’t have a second M in the genre and is rather a multiplayer survival game set upon a shared Arrakis with hundreds of players. Ditching the MMO moniker, or at least the word massive, was important to distance themselves from the grind mindset where quests dictate progression rather than crafting. For Funcom, the endgame intended for Dune Awakening is political intrigue and faction warfare. For some, the ultimate goal in Dune Awakening will be battling rival houses and that visceral PVP component they have planned.
Funcom’s intended focus for Dune Awakening is built upon five distinct pillars that make up SPICE. S, for Survival and the player’s constant struggle for water, shelter, and thriving away from sand worms. P, for Political Survival and the endgame of aligning with one of 25 great houses to issue server-wide decrees based on the winning vote tallies (one example Joel gave was to say that all PVP is full-loot PVP, with players dropping their entire inventory upon death). I, for Infinite Exploration and the cartography and exploration with a map that changes week to week as coriolis storms wipe out the surface of Arrakis and both hides and resurfaces landmarks with the occasional unique point of interest or dungeon being revealed. C, for Combined Arms and their focus on blending both melee and ranged combat together. Lastly, E is for Expression and Customization, with the central focus on the building systems as well as player build and fashion customizations.
Our hands-on with Dune: Awakening was focused on the first phase of the intended flow of gameplay: Survival. From the first moments of character creation to literally being dropped into a dank cave and being forced to carve one's way out, Dune: Awakening is heavy on the tutorials as new mechanics are conferred upon the player and build up much like sand in an hourglass. For every mission meant to drive the story forward, players have ten or so objectives to learn about crafting and gathering to go through first.
Much of what we were able to experience firsthand was still just the tutorial meant to introduce players to the essentials of base crafting and constructing our first vehicle in order to proceed further north into the sand dunes. With only a limited fraction of the skills and tools available, we did not have the chance to delve out into learning abilities from other classes or craft unique armaments beyond a couple of low-rank armor schematics I came across in an ecolab overtaken by bandits that gave me a suspensor belt with a powerful glide that would help me traverse into climbing areas that I wouldn’t ordinarily have been able to reach on minimal stamina.
Combat is a bit of a mixed bag in my early few hours with Dune: Awakening. While I’m certainly glad that Funcom is ambitious about finding ways to make melee and ranged weapons both equally effective, in its current state, both systems could use a bit more refining to make them feel like more than just wildly flailing around at times. This early in the narrative, the player doesn’t have access to shields, while just about every humanoid that’s in the player’s way is equipped with one as part of their standard kit. To get around this, there’s really ultimately two ways that work consistently well. One is to waste all of your darts trying to overpower the enemy and overload their shields; the other is to nail a simple three-hit melee combo and then hold down the attack button for a slow blade to push through the shields and attack directly. I’d like to see more creative ways to disable an enemy’s shields in the final release rather than the same simple combo over and over again. The combat designer did show some mid-level gameplay with mixing in active skills like a flying knee that might help spice up (pun intended) combat in the later stages.
Early game crafting in Dune: Awakening comes down to harvesting whatever materials you can hoard and then making a simple base from scratch (floor, four walls, ceiling, and a door at the minimum) and slowly building out to introduce new crafting facilities after completing tutorials over time. Making a base also creates a new spawn point, giving a little incentive to stop and take a breather after filling your pockets with stones. Players have the agency to construct their buildings freely as they wish, although there weren’t options to lock pieces such as walls together or even rotate an object before placing it in the base. I found that I had to physically walk around and pixel hunt to find the perfect spot where I could drop an ore refinery without overlapping a nearby storage crate.
When I found myself wanting to move into the northern segment of the map, I farmed up the resources to create a base duplicator tool and copied my existing base only to attempt to deploy it in another location. The immediate problem I discovered is that it only copies the overall layout, so it was up to me to farm a whole second set of materials to start crafting my base, something that took a fair bit of time to even get the requisite amount of stone to create the foundation and walls. In hindsight, it would make sense that I couldn’t effectively duplicate my materials but it wasn’t immediately obvious given the limited tooltips available in the current build.
Funcom is in the midst of crafting a worthy follow-up to Frank Herbert’s legacy with the book series’ first multiplayer RPG outside the MUDs of the early 1990s. While there’s still some polish left to be applied to both the combat and crafting mechanics, the spice is already in place to be Funcom’s next breakaway hit. Keep your blue eyes open for a Dune: Awakening PC launch later this year, with console ports on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X to follow.
[Editor’s Note: Wccftech was invited by Funcom’s public relations team to attend their hands-on preview event in Oslo, Norway. Travel accommodations were provided by Funcom.]
