Dune: Awakening Reaffirms Its Intent As A Survival Game, Clarifies Server and Map Structure

Dune: Awakening currently has the mantle of being one of the most hotly-anticipated multiplayer games out there, but multiplayer games seem to come with their own launch day woes. In a new blog post, Funcom spent a bit of time explaining the structure of the servers and worlds, hoping to quell some of those fears. 

But first, Funcom really needs its players to know that Dune: Awakening isn't a standard MMORPG, nor a little survival game. As they explain it, Dune: Awakening is a survival game at heart, but Funcom has put forth the time and resources to make it on an MMORPG scale, with social, trading, and larger story features. In short, they want to raise the bar for survival games and are basically doubling down that it’s not exactly the wave of solo MMORPGs that are out there. 

The article also gets into the server structure previously explained in streams and elsewhere. Players will pick a server within a World, and within that server, they’ll be wandering throughout several areas where interaction styles and population will flux. 

Hagga Basin is the core homeland of sorts for all players on all servers, where fights and buildings will take place. It’s shared by all players, with up to 40 concurrently present on each, and can be visited by and on other servers. The social hubs are static, well, social hubs, and will be the core of NPC interactions. These are where instances start to sprawl a bit once they start to fill. 

The Deep Desert has been the point of friction for many interested in the game, as it’s the main PvP map—and where the bulk of the endgame will take place. It’s explained as being “several maps seamlessly linked together, meaning you move across them seamlessly without loading,” hence Funcom’s designation as large-scale survival. Players will be encouraged to spread out throughout the map, and once a week, there’ll be a full reset of points of interest and resources. 

Then, the team gets into the nitty-gritty of the inevitable flood of players at Dune: Awakening’s launch. Funcom assures players that there’ll be literally thousands of servers, and the design of the game, including the Hagga Basin portion, queues and filters in the players at a reasonable pace, though players will be encouraged to start elsewhere if a server gets too big. 

For those who don’t want to deal with that sort of war of logging in, there’ll be private servers down the line, but those won’t be available at launch. 

Basically, ahead of both the beta this weekend and the delayed (but still close) launch next month, Funcom seems quite aware of the reputation of launch-day games, and they’re really leaning on their tested server and world systems to (hopefully) make it work. Plus, to give a little more clarity beyond that, they held an AMA yesterday on the official subreddit.