Year-End Dune: Awakening Blog Shares Closed Beta Stats, Hints Social Features and More

The Dune: Awakening team rounded out their year and holiday season with a new Communinet blog, the team’s semi-regular big update blog that shows progress, recent events, and even a few player questions. 

The team did provide some nifty gameplay stats on their closed beta sessions, which addressed some of the core gameplay tenets. For instance, players apparently extracted 1.5 million liters of blood from enemies and wildlife killed, and a whopping 31% of players chose to go with the Bene Gesserit as a mentor, as opposed to the Swordmaster, Trooper or the thinking machine replacement Mentat. 

As for future developments, they’re pretty hush on current work being done, but a few community questions were picked to be answer. Regarding social features, players will be able to party up without being in a guild together, and there’ll be close-proximity voice chat and text chat on launch. 

The team revealed that when players die in the Deep Desert, the primary PvP endgame area, for now, players will lose just the items and resources in their inventory, but not equipped gear. And in the larger picture, the team is currently testing Guild influence factors and mechanics, where they can be chosen by Major Houses via Faction-versus-Faction gameplay. It seems that winning Guilds will be able to choose World-wide “decrees” for the next period of time, too, so that’ll be something to look out for for more serious players looking to influence the Landsraad. 

Other than these updates, the team also shows off nifty fan content including a cool real-life Pain Box, as well as an interview with one of their star cosplayers, “Anhyra,” who donned her stillsuit cosplay for PAX East, Gamescom, and other major gaming events. 

It’s a solid closer for Funcom’s project given the year Dune: Awakening has had. As the game continues its NDA-locked closed beta servers, we went from having hands-off gameplay demos to having a 30-minute gameplay showcase at Gamescom, plus a narrative trailer reminding us that we are not, in fact, Paul Atredes. 

MMORPG also recently got to sit down with Joel Bylos, who’s been a Funcom staple and serves as Awakening’s Creative Director, to talk about the Journey System and the narrative adventure players will take. As always, we’ll keep an eye out for more on this much-anticipated game as it continues development and testing.