Dune Awakening Needs To Hurry Up And Show Off The Endgame

Funcom’s Dune: Awakening is primarily a survival game, and compared to others in the genre, its combat is actually perfectly serviceable. It’s not good by any means — more accurately, I’d call the current state of combat right now “mid.” But Awakening is also an endgame PvP MMO. However, we’ve not seen any snippets of this endgame yet, which is a little concerning considering the game is due to release in just under a month. If its long-term success and health rests on the state of endgame combat, we had better see some balancing and further tweaks by Funcom before release.

Melee Combat – Shields And Swords

Dune’s universe in the original Frank Herbert novels deals with the novelty of melee combat in a futuristic world – trying to capture that feeling of feudal duels and troops slicing each other to death with swords – with the introduction of shields. Shields (generally) can’t be pierced by ranged weaponry, as they deflect fast-moving projectiles. However, shields act a little like a non-Newtonian fluid. The slower the shield is impacted, the more likely the knife is to enter it.

For lore purposes, this is because the shields have to be designed to allow the wearer to breathe, and air molecules must be able to pass through the shield. The limit of the shield’s protection is then determined by the speed of said air molecules.

This was always going to be tricky to bring to life in a video game. Maybe it’d work in a more refined experience where the main focus of the game is combat, but in a title the size of Dune: Awakening – with the scope encompassing an entire desert planet, massive sand worms, and more resources and items than I can even comprehend right now – it feels like the melee combat needs a lot more work.

There’s an advanced skill tree for sword fighting in Dune: Awakening which all sounds pretty great – including the Iron Will skill, which makes you invulnerable to the abilities of the Bene Gesserit. But it’s in its current state, the meta just seems to be: get as close as you can to an enemy player and spam your knife attack, eventually staggering your opponent in a never-ending stun lock. This definitely needs to be reworked to make melee play at all viable or fun.

We’ve only really seen a snippet of gameplay so far, around 20-30 hours in a playable state. The endgame skills and combat might be more advanced, although we’re not certain how long the game is in terms of leveling and progression. All we know is that in the current betas, we’ve only played the first two zones – there are several more, according to in-game maps.

Ranged Combat – Darts

Like many others, I chose to play as a Trooper during the closed beta, mostly because of the Grappling Hook, although it seems like the early meta will definitely revolve around ranged weaponry. The gunplay is equally mid. Most of the early weapons are the same shade of familiar grey and predictable, though there are a few upgrades for snipers and shotguns, but even as you progress through the starting zones the new weapons you find are essentially the same just with slightly better damage numbers.

You can easily train to be a Trooper at the first trading post in the game, so it doesn’t necessarily make sense to choose it as your starting class.

Ranged combat is something I really hope gets more advanced the further you progress. I love the idea of playing as a sneaky sniper holed up on some cliff face taking pot shots at enemy players across the desert.

Repetitive AI Combat

With everything we’ve seen so far, it’s likely that you could play the entirety of Awakening in a PvE guild and ignore the PvP aspects. The issue is that during the 30 hours of gameplay I’ve seen so far, the AI enemies just aren’t very great. Combat can be pretty buggy, especially in melee, and the lack of a lock-on for melee combat and some general camera bugginess means getting up and slicing your opponents sort of sucks.

Enemies are also pretty repetitive, with the same types of bad guys showing up at every different PoI. I’d hope that this is something that gets expanded on the further the game goes, as for the most part, I found soloing all the combat with my dart gun to be pretty simplistic. Climbing on a roof and shooting your enemies from above just seems like a no-brainer. But it’s not particularly fun.

Dune: Awakening has the potential to be one of the best survival games in years, but it feels like its combat is still holding it back a little bit. It’s very close to being worked out, though, and I hope that the feedback from the closed beta helps the developers make some crucial changes ahead of its full release.