I’m a seasoned survival game player with hundreds upon hundreds of hours of grinding to my name. I’ve harvested flax in Enshrouded, blood in V Rising, metal ore in Valheim, and cabbages in Project Zomboid. And yet none of this prepared me for the grind that awaits in Dune: Awakening. The desert planet of Arrakis is surprisingly abundant with resources, and you need them all if you want to survive and prosper.
Copper, iron, blood, water, scrap metal, fabrics, processors, the list goes on and on. Don’t even get me started on the stone, which you’ll need plenty of – especially if you’re an idiot like me who builds his base in the wrong place three times. Pair this with some tedious travel time, and you’ve got a recipe for a frustrating grind. I made it through in the end, but the thought of doing it again, possibly two or three more times, fills me with dread.
Let Me Just Wee In My Suit, Please
Dune: Awakening has a very rigid tutorial structure, and it feels like it lasts for several hours. Once you unlock your first items, it’s time to go and learn some new recipes, so that you can incrementally unlock better items. Copper to iron. Iron to steel. And on and on and on. Each level of progression makes the last feel totally redundant, which also removes any sort of achievement for progressing through the different tiers. It’s an awful progression system.
I understand this is a staple of the survival genre. Most games have this sort of tier progression. The issue with Dune: Awakening is that each tier lasts a really long time, and the process of acquiring different resources doesn’t change much between each tier. You need a lot of resources from very similar locations, and you’ll probably need to visit said locations more than once. Most of the upgrades are just one-to-one replicas of items you previously owned, just with slightly better stats.
Some of this grind can be expedited by using the trading post to buy important resources. However, you still need to accrue currency to purchase resources, a currency which is primarily earned from visiting locations where the resources are located anyway. Even when trying to expedite the grind, the game shoehorns you back down that tunnel or to clear out the same raider camp for the thirtieth time.
I particularly felt the bite of the grind upon realising that I’d built my base in the wrong location, which is to say, not close enough to the trading posts where you can collect contract quests and buy important items. You can quickly copy and paste your base to a new location – but everything, from the walls to the machinery inside, needs to be rebuilt with the same resources. I won’t be making that mistake again, that’s for sure.
This Is Going To Get Competitive
I’ve played a few hundred hours of Rust, which is more hours than I like to admit, and more than is good for my mental health, but it also means I’m well-versed in group grinding. Dune: Awakening will probably require the same sort of dedication to get going during the early game. The more of you, the better. You could fill an entire Hagga Basin server with your friends and probably blitz through the entire early game in a couple of hours.
This isn’t really a problem and is encouraged by the way the game is designed. However, due to the endgame being locked behind this early game progression, the players who blitz the survival stages quickly will be best placed to dominate the early Spice harvests and claim control of the planet. I suppose the hardest workers should be rewarded with the greatest gains, but I can see how this could quickly spiral out of control. I wonder how the game is balanced to prevent certain groups and guilds from just dominating the entire time – we know there will be weekly wipes of the endgame zone, but how much advantage can be earned from dominating week-to-week?
Obviously, you can just sit back and relax and play Dune Awakening like a solo survivor, and I’m sure you’ll still have a good time. But just a PSA, you’re probably going to want to bring a few friends along for this ride – or thirty.
Dune: Awakening
- Released
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June 10, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Funcom
- Publisher(s)
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Funcom
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5
