As the reveals for Dune: Awakening ramp up, we’ve been given a tiny tease of the game’s—perhaps the universe’s—most important resource: spice, the rare hallucinogenic and chemical (and more?) only farmable from a single desert planet. The video clip gives a tiny snippet of what to expect from it. “Water is life, and spice is power,” as Funcom says.
We already know that players will have a number of ways to take in water, including harvesting enemies' blood and water, but spice will be a whole different beast, surely not at the least because it’s at the center of Dune’s universe. One of our writers already got to see spice harvesting in action through a hands-off demo at PAX, highlighting the crafts, tools, and technique necessary to mine the valuable resource.
However, as any Dune fan knows, spice isn’t all glamorous, and it seems there’ll be “a more malevolent aspect, because the more spice you use, the more addicted to spice you become. We haven’t gotten anything of a preview to see how this’ll play out in the MMORPG, but here’s hoping it’s an interesting mechanic.
The hands-off demo formats have been an interesting choice given closed beta testing has already been ongoing, albeit with NDAs, but the open-world survival game still seems like one of the more promising works of Dune media. Will you indulge in spice, or just farm its resources?
