Hello sleepers!
It has been long time since my last review, you see life has been too much the past few months and Dune has taken some hours from my life as well :)
It is one of the few games that I have managed 100% completion on the achievements! As of now, I have 1034.8 hours in this epic game but this is on my main account, I have 2 more alt accounts which roughly makes it to 1500 hours!
To begin with the review, I have to say that I was aware of the Dune universe and the books and the sandworm prior to this game but I wasn’t really invested into it. When funcom announced the game, I had wishlisted it on the spot but I haven’t watched the movies or read the books.
I love survival crafting games with lore and good visuals! This game had it all!
Then the open beta game came and I wasn’t very happy, you see this isn’t the first funcom title for me, I also have Conan Exiles and Dune: Awakening was super similar in a lot of aspects which made me feel like “I don’t want to play the same game with different skin” so I played a bit, didn’t go far and logged out, kinda forgotten about it.
Weeks passed and the game was released! I saw a lot of people from my friendlist playing the game and I was like “Okay, I want to give it a go”, but since I have far too many survival games, I didn’t want to pay full price for a reskinned Conan, so I went to grayzone markets and found it for like 17€ and the adventure begins!
After downloading the game, about 40gb, on 1gbps FTTH it took a few minutes, I was ready to play but I couldn’t play! Every single server was full! After a few attempts I managed to get into randomly to the world named Icarus, in Sietch Jacurutu. Now, as I said earlier, I was aware about Dune but didn’t knew what a sietch was. The game also doesn’t explain, it relies heavily on people to have seen the movies Dune 1 and Dune 2 or have read the books. Not that the sietch in the books have the same meaning in the game. I am not saying this at all! What I am saying is that is better if you have prior knowledge either from the movies or the books to help you understand the world of Dune: Awakening a bit better.
An image to try to explain how the worlds and the Hagga Basins of Dune: Awakening works. Under 1 Server(world), there are lots of smaller Hagga Basin servers and all of them share the same Deep Desert and cities.
After my initial shock that I couldn’t login and after many attempts that got me in Jacurutu, I finally see the map! The graphics are NOT jaw dropping but they very good! Yes, they could (and should) have been better but at least they are not cartoonish like the monstrosity “Enshrouded”. Control are great -when the game doesn’t lag or stutters- and the story is super addictive!
I metaphorically dived into its world, I start doing the missions and building a base, gathering materials and strived to make my first vehicle, the sandbike!
I used to drive for 7 years a Piaggio MP3 Yourban which was also a trike with 2 wheels in the front, now I am driving a proper motorbike :D But anyway, it was a happy moment, now with the sandbike, I could travel the sands of Arrakis much faster!
And also I could cross the first desert gap, Vermilious gap to be in the middle of the map. In Dune: Awakening and in other games, I tend not to spoil it by looking in guides or maps and so on but in this case, I should have done that. Because the game guided me (and us, the players) to abandon our first small base and make a new one in the new location, all fine and good but the problem is that the middle of the map apart from having a few starter one time missions, doesn’t have anything of interest at all!
A base there is deadend for mid-to late game. For example a resource that is needed in the millions, yes, you’ve read correct, millions, is aluminium which is only in the north of the map!
So having a base in the middle of the map which doesn’t have any of it was a problem.
But you see, those early days of Dune, that servers were always full, there was no room to build. So I made my base there. An awful little square box, with no imagination. During this time, 2 of my friends who also play lots of survival games, started Dune as well and they were pressuring me not to progress further in order for us to progress as a group. This game doesn’t work this way but we didn’t knew that. So even if I had time to play, I wasn’t playing because I was waiting for the guys to catch up to me.
But those guys never spend any minute in the game claiming various excuses.
So one day I had enough with all this crap, I was watching the world around me getting more and more occupied, buildings everywhere, small to extra large. People flying around while I was still on the sandbike and I said “fuck them, I am going to play” and it was a good thing that I did. I started doing the rest of the AQL quests, made my first buggy (a ground vehicle for up to four people to mine resources in larger scale and to transport materials as well) and went to the part that I needed to make my first ornithopter.
The ornithopter is a game changer, the moment you start flying in Dune: Awakening is the moment the world gets bigger! Not only you can explore the rest of the Hagga Basin map but you can get to exit to the world map, discover the Deep Desert (endgame area) and the 2 cities of the game, Harko Village and Arrakeen. All of them can be accessed by an npc stationed in all traders for a small fee of the currency of the game, solaris. But in early game and late game (I will also explain later) solaris is kind of hard to get so spending 2500 of it for each flight is not good! Having my own ornithopter saved me lots of time and solaris. It took me nearly a month to make it to the point to have an ornithopter, most people have it in about 10 days or so, or even sooner if they play in a group. Not to forget that with the ornithopter, the treat of the the Sandworm is almost eliminated!
From that point on, the game was too much fun for me and I decided after having spend 200 hours in this cheap alt account to buy it for my main account and start over. I would be giving myself an ornithopter from level 1, so the game shouldn’t take me this much to reach it on the same level with my first character right? And yes, I was correct. In a couple of days I was able to do all 5 classes quests, the 8 AQL Trials and progress all the story, a couple of days later funcome released Chapter 2 which added a few more missions and items and so on.
By that time, I was starting harvesting spice sand to make spice melange in order to crafter better refineries in my base and the higher grade vehicles. 1 day I was lurking to harvest a small spice field, I was on top of it overlooking it before the spice eruption and I was recording it for a youtube video which in the end I never made. When I landed on the spice field, another player landed there as well, I didn’t want to confort anyone that day, so I said in the chat something of the sort of “sorry my friend, its your spice” and I left. Even though I was camping it for some time, he wasn’t there and only appear to it after I landed on it. Anyway, what’s 600 spice sand after all? Nothing!
But this guy looked me up and invited me over to his base, one of the largest and most impressive bases I have seen in the game! I knew that base because he had it on the 2nd trader and I was going there to do missions so it was impossible to miss it. But other than driving under it, I never really checked it out. I don’t do that in general, I might observe things from distance but I never touch something that isn’t mine.
He invited me over, showed me around his impressive base and he even gifted me the 200 spice melange I was in need for at the time and for that I am eternally grateful!
We started played together, he helped me move my base to a new location, and he even build my bases for me.
Communication was tricky because I am Greek but I do speak English fluently, yeah I do not have English or American accent but I do understand English perfectly and I can express myself clearly (you are reading this review after all in English, written by me and not by AI), he is Russian who spoke on occasion broken English. So me asking for a top to bottom base meant probably a base in the middle or something of the sort. I don’t want to nimble about it much, the sum of this was that communication was tricky at best.
People who know me, know that I do not have prejudice against anyone, I tend not to like skopjedonians because they aren’t Macedonians under any definitions other than they want to steal an identity and history and Greece is weak to defend its history, name, reputation, honor. For such a historical crime, if I were in power, I would have bombed this pseudonation out of existence. A rat born in a horse’s stable, isn’t a horse. Simple as that. This pseudonation is just close to Macedonia, this doesn’t make it Macedonian. Period. But that’s me and that is another topic.
What I want to say is that I had no problem with him being Russian, even Ukrainians in the game played in harmony with Russians, no flame, no aggression! Which was surprising to say the least!
The game is fun and all but has some huge problems which we all hope funcome will solve with the patch 1.3.20.0 with the introduction of self hosted private servers.
You see dear sleeper, the game supported only the official servers and private servers by game hosting corporations which meant the game had a severe endgame problem.
Although many things changed since launch, I have to address all the problems and then explain if and how and when they were solved, if they were solved that is.
I mentioned earlier the Deep Desert, this is the place for endgame. This place was from the start a PvP zone. Do you need spice sand to make spice melange? Fight for it! Do you need Titanium and Stravidium to made Plastanium? You guessed it! Fight for it!
How many braincells dear sleepers do you think are needed to see where this goes? 1? 2? 3? 4????? Not that many anyway. The first people who managed to go to the Deep Desert and gather those resources had little to no competition and had the time and power to abuse lower level/gear players. This is called griefing. It is not unique in Dune but it is a huge deal in this game.
Dune lost a huge percentage of its player base when people went to endgame content. People couldn’t farm the things needed to progress, even if they wanted to be PvPers and do PvP, they couldn’t.
Gear grade difference matters a lot, it is even far worse now after chapter 3 but I will get back to it later.
Funcom seeing the player base dropped by 95% made the 50% of the Deep Desert PvE, south that is -with a few zones such as shipwrecks as PvP zones- and the top 50% of it remained PvP. This brought a few people back, kept some, among those myself, as I said earlier, I was kept back by friends who wanted to progress with me but they never joined in the end.
So now people had access to small and medium spice fields in the lower 50% of the Deep Desert and also access to Titanium and Stravidium for making plastanium.
But the good spice, the spice that is fun to farm with vehicles like the crawler which needs to be carried there by the carrier was the Large Spice Field which was locked in the PvP 50% of the map.
I can’t lie, I have been to a few LSF with the Russian guy, we have harvested large quantities of spice sand.
But 1 day a guy who appeared out of nowhere, landed on top of the carrier ornithopter and started hitting with rockets like never before from point blank, this caused the carrier to crash on a nearby “island”, then this guy started to destroy my harvester as well. He managed to kill both the Russian guy and me. By the time we went back there, he had pushed with his scout ornithopter the much large -and now immobile- vehicles to the sand, placed a thumper and the sandworm ate them…at that time, the vehicle loss was permanent.
Hours and hours of farming, refining, gathering and building those 2 endgame vehicles went down the drain and for what?
-Did this player killed us in order to take the LSF for himself? Nope!
-Did he earn anything for killing us? Nope, there was no loot from us since we were carrying only fuel for the vehicles and he had the scout copter so even if he wanted to take the spice sand, he could only take like 3% of it no more.
-Do people doing PvP in Dune earn anything? Let’s say an achievement? Or Does the game have a PvP counter to show off your kills? NOPE! NOTHING!
Disappointment to say the least and the community is highly toxic. I didn’t share this experience in their discord server nor wrote about it in steam, I have read similar stories to mine and how they were treated.
A week after this incident, funcom made a patch where vehicles being destroyed can be claimed back by the vehicle backup tool for a small fee and a small percentage of damage in its durability…so for a few days I have lost a month’s worth of time, material and stress. Not that wasn’t a welcome solution but still I had to farm those materials again.
I can understand PvP to gain fame, reputation, Kill/Death ratio, I can even understand killing people in order to assert dominance over a resource “I killed you so I can take the spice for myself”. Makes sense.
The “I killed you, destroyed your vehicles that you have put so much effort on making” doesn’t make any sense to me. And apparently to the remaining 80% of the players seems to be holding a similar -if not the same- opinion with me.
I quote:
Dune: Awakening offers a variety of playstyles. However, with over 80% of our lifetime players exclusively engaging with PvE content, the convergence of PvE and PvP, particularly in the Deep Desert, didn’t align with our objectives and remained a significant topic of discussion.
Combining our goals, the in-game data, and the results of player surveys, made it clear that we needed to rethink our approach and underline the PvE-first nature of the game. While PvP conflict is an important aspect of Dune: Awakening for some, it must be optional and incentivized rather than required for progression.
My speculation is that if Dune: Awakening didn’t lose 95% of its player base, this 80% of the current player base would be something of the sort of 95% if not higher.
But I can’t avoid the discussion about the variety of playstyles that they say. There aren’t many. There are 5 classes only, 1 of them is planetologist which is passive only for better farming and more efficient. The playstyles that I have seen are only 3.
1)PvP. Which is not bad, this is what I would be doing as well if I had the ability to make proper gear and be in the proper event. My goal is to be good at it, not to destroy other player’s gear and equipment.
2)PvE. The game is mostly like that, it makes sense, you need to farm materials to improve your base, your tools and in the end your gear with the final goal to be ready for PvP at some point…or keep on farming to be a marketeer.
3)Griefer. The worst kind of player there is. They do not do PvP with PvPers, they would lose instantly. They only go to harass the PvE players. Don’t you think for a moment that the 50% PvE Deep Desert is safe. The griefer will still be able to put thumpers next to your spice field, would use his shield to attract the sandworm, would fly his ornithopter on top of yours when you need to fly away to avoid the attack of the sandworm, in general they are in the game in order to annoy and make the life difficult for the PvE player.
Both PvP and PvE players dislike the griefers, the PvE because they do not want to engage in PvP but they want to play their game, and the PvP because those motherfuckers do not go for actual PvP! Mostly they are frightened little ladyboys who have no skills to actually PvP and their only joy in life is harassing the farming majority.
Many of the issues I have written above would have been solved IF the game had different areas for each activity.
Having only the 50% of the DD as PvE and locking the Large Spice Fields behind PvP wall is what made the game to lose another fraction of its population.
Personally, I have been asking from the first day the ability to self host. I have the ability, I have the know how, I have the infrastructure for it.
Forcing me to play in public servers and locking my endgame behind forced PvP won’t make me “work harder” in order to make it there as griefers love to say.
There are literally thousands of games out there that can provide me what I want.
-If I want to PvP, guess what? There are PvP games.
-If I want to play shooter games, guess what? There are shooter games!
And so on.
All that now brings me to another good thing that will happen with patch 1.3.20.0! The will spit the Deep Desert into 2 different instances.
1st will be PvE only, no PvP shipwrecks and so on. Only PvE!
2nd will be PvP above the A line. The brave souls who will go there, will have an excellent harvesting boost of x2.5 times!
But guess which group complains about this split? The griefers!
The PvP players are cool to have an instance where they can PvP with similar minded people, the PvE players are happy(I will write why the shouldn’t be happy in a while) for having the ability to explore the rest 50% of the game that was locked behind PvP wall.
But the griefers are still the big winners of this update, no matter how much they cry about it! Funcom haven’t addressed real concerns about grieving in the PvE Deep Desert, those motherfuckers can still use shields to attract the sandworm, those motherfuckers can still use thumpers to attract the sandworm, those motherfuckers can still use their ornithopters to press down other players or push them out of the field. Basically their only limitation is their imagination. Don’t you think for a moment that those motherfuckers will go to PvP zone to PvP. Those motherfuckers are chickens and cowards!
In my steam review of the game, I made a recommendation about a new button or option where PvE players will have to report the griefer. This should be a legit action though, run through some AI with recordings from both the offended and offender and from surrounding players, reach a conclusion, if this was a legit griefer, instant teleport him to the PvP instance with a debuff that would not allow them to exit the PvP area for an hour. The more times this motherfucker griefs, the longer the penalty should be. Also an icon on the map for all in PvP zone to see him would be nice. Clearly this motherfucker was in the wrong instance, he wanted to PvP, here, the PvE players helped him go to where he belonged in the first place.
Hear me now, this system needs training in order to recognize non griefers. I am certain that if any group of friends are harvesting in the PvE DD and a random appears to farm, this group will report him as griefer only to kick him out. So this system needs some protection from false reports. But obviously if a person have been repeatedly reported then funcome should design a system to deal with players whose only reason to exist is to annoy others.
How come funcom doesn’t see that griefers hurt their income as well? Are they just happy with the sales of the game?
There is a silverline to all of the above, they finally gave in to the pressure and will allow us to self host private servers! Hooray! I have been ready since open beta. Took them 1 year but they are coming soon!
Yes, the game had private servers from day 1 but that was the problem, first of all you had to pay hosting companies for it, 2nd and biggest problem, you only “owned” the Hagga Basin instance. The Deep Desert was shared with other players, so not only you had to pay for the game, you had to pay for a private server and you were being griefed even there and you paid for it!
They must think of their players as morons to treat us like that…
So right now I am on hold to get my hands on the server files, I am not interested in modding the server files, nor to change the rates to insane amounts.
I just want to enjoy the game without having random assholes harvesting my resources or destroying my vehicles when I am out to farm. I do not also have the ability to be in a guild that has an army to go with 10 people (pilot for the carrier, driver for the harvester, boots on the ground, scout ornithopters for reconnaissance, assault ornithopters to attack) in order to harvest the spice fields. Nor I want to go to a spice field that will be swarmed by 20 randoms with compactors attracting the sandworm every 5 seconds. I just want to play the game. How hard to understand is this?
I have left out for long time the russian guy.
He is still here.
Chapter: MKos
Before the announcement of the 1.3.20.0 update, well a couple of weeks before that, I had a strange conversation with this guy.
Yes, he build my bases, yes, bases in plural. While the game was losing players and bases were left abandoned to be destroyed by the sandstorms, I was busy claiming land people left behind in premium location!
All those 4 bases that you see here are my bases, all those 4 were built by the russian guy. Basically I own a full neighborhood in the Eastern Shield Wall!
So somewhere lost in translation this guy thought that probably he owns me or something. Yes, he build them. Yes, he used lots of his own materials. Yes, he used lots of his own time. And yes, he did great work!
Flying in this area lags a lot and has fps drops but it is a joy to behold!
At some point we met some players that have transfered to our server, those guys are nice and fun and friendly! In this pic, you can’t see a 5th base that belong to a real life friend of mine who have started recently the game. I didn’t have lots of endgame materials, I had basically a few to serve myself so now I have to take care of a friend as well, we asked subtly the russian guy to help us go and farm materials, usually he was up to such tasks. Every time he needed materials, he would ask me and we would go together, every time I wanted materials, I would ask him and he would come and help me.
But now that my friend was in the game, every time I asked him, he turned his back on me and my friend. So our new friends, gave as a gift to my friend 1000 spice malange! This was huge help!
More than I had myself in reserve! And we hang out with our new friends every day.
They never spoke bad about the russian guy, they never asked us to leave his guild that were in. We just played the game.
So the russian guy started to speak bad about them and started to lie about me as well. Remember from earlier that I said communication was tricky at best? Well, this guy dictated by voice to his iPhone in the telegram application in Russian, send the text to me and I had to use translation to make sense. Sometimes I could understand what he meant, sometimes not. Sometimes I had to use multiple translation tools and still fail to make sense.
In a reply I gave him about his list of accusations I have even mentioned that, that I give him the benefit of the doubt because of how purely the translation was. But the problem dear sleeper was that the things he said in that list, he had said also in the past. So it couldn’t be mistake. If it was first time, fine. But 2nd time? It can’t be coincidence right?
This guy was full of contradictions. He started with “nobody accuses you of anything” and the list has like 21 accusations against me. Great start right?
Most of the things he said was easy to demonstrate how wrong he was, but then there was also lots of lies. Lots and lots of lies.
The easier lie was that I sold land. In order to sell land, one must first own the land. This land didn’t belong to me but a streamer which I thought we were friends with the name “Zhoxie” real work of art herself. The land didn’t belong to me so I couldn’t sell it. Nor there is an option for that… 2nd we went and asked Zhoxie in her stream about her base, she said she doesn’t care, she isn’t coming back to the game ever.
I didn’t care, she didn’t care…who’s left to care? Ah the russian guy!
I had asked like 7 times to this point if he wants that base for whatever reason or not, because 1 of our new friends wants the location. 0 out 7 times he replied with a straight answer. Only that I was free to do what I wanted. Because again, I do not owned that land, I couldn’t give it or sell it. I had to destroy the roofs that protected the subfief and let the sandstorms take care of the rest. But you see, at no point nobody offered me any money or items, my new friend just asked and after getting 2/3 clear ok and 1 wtf, I just handed the land to my new friend. Under which dictionary does this action counts as a sale? How did I sell land?
I can upload a pdf that I made in order to reply to the russian guy. But you see dear sleeper, the moment I had dragged the pdf file into the telegram chat and I was ready to press the enter key, he started lying again to a russian girl who was in the group chat as well. He said again that I sold the land to Harkonnens and he was very insulting, she piled on of course. Why not to pile on a lie? It is free after all right? Apparently my new friend was camping the subfief console because it was close to be destroyed, at this point it needed 2 more sandstorms, the russian guy decided to go and refuel the generators in that base so my new friend trolled him a bit with benign insults. But you know how insults are, there are the mean ones and the benign ones, but guess which of the 2 options the russian guy chose to claim it happen? The mean ones of course! So while it was true, someone insulted him, the way it happened was in trolling mode but if you are an asshole, you opt for the asshole behaviour. After this chat, that I had to take a stand and tell him to shut the fuck with the lies, he removed me from the group and removed my access to his bases throughout the map. I removed him as well from my bases. This is not the outcome I wanted but I will not tolerate for a fraction of second such lies and behaviour. You will have to read the pdf in order to understand the magnitude of the situation. Over here I have oversimplified lots of things and underplayed them a lot, because this a Dune: Awakening review and not a “russian asshole review”. But to give a little more info, this guy has super megalomania, he is god and we all are little insects, if he invites people to group, the group is the best because he cherrypicked the players. If I invite the same people, the group is lame, the players are retards and so on.
I offered him help to do a new dungeon in higher level with one of my new friends, he was super offensive towards me and my friends. I can go on for 21 topics he chose to share. But I will address one thing, that will journey us back to the start almost.
He said in his accusations towards me and his holier than thou text that he likes to help new people. Do you want to know how he helps new people? By depriving them of resources! In the midst of those things, I have started a new character just to be able to claim even more land now that Dune: Awakening allows again family share. So I have a new character that he doesn’t know about and I went to a small spice field to harvest spice, guess who showed up to steal my compactions? The guy who likes to help new players! If you remember near the start, I said I was camping a new spice field, waiting for its eruption so I could go harvest it, he came and stole it. Sure, he gave me 200 spice melange after which is many many many times more than the potential 600 spice sand I could have gotten from the small spice field. The same thing was reported to me by another real life friend who have started the game after my invitation. He was out harvesting spice sand and a certain MKos (the russian guy) showed up to steal his compactions. Isn’t this amazing help to the new players?
Do you know what I did to help new players? I have claimed some land in an area that is somewhat safe to harvest spice sand, near imperial testing station 10. Instead of building this area and keeping it for myself, I made it open to all, made a tall base to provide shade and gave access to free water to all players who go there. Protection from the sun, protection from sandstorms, protection from sandworm, free water. He goes and steals other people’s resources. Which of the two is helping new players again?
Yes, at some point, he helped me redesign that base to a better looking base but I already had that lot and a base that provided the above for long time before the redesign.
I will return to MKos in the landsraad review.
Chapter: Landsraad or garbageland?
After starting the game, I watched the movies and start to read the books, I am still in book 1 so I can’t tell much about landsraad as it is meant to be but in the game it was a hit or miss or miss by a lot system.
Let me explain, it is not that is hidden but it was never obvious, the missions were confusing at best and most of them weren’t easy to complete. The rewards? pure garbage.
Who used it? Retards to my knowledge. Only people who cared about guild rankings in the game. What can you do with guild rankings? Supposedly you can attract new players to join your guild. The MKos guild that I was in and never gave a fuck about was in cyrillic characters. Never even cared to asked what it means. Guilds meant nothing to the game. No protection, no enemies, no bonuses. NOTHING. But you see dear sleeper, ranking meant a lot to MKos, he was busting my balls about it constantly and of course I didn’t comply. For me it had 0 gains and only time loss.
The developers in chapter 3 decided to tie a new system that gives abilities to the player to the landsraad system. They kind of redesign it, still the house representatives are far too many and spread ALL over the Hagga Basin, Deep Desert, Harko village and Arrakeen, still the rewards are garbage, only exception is the exp given as well with the missions for the new abilities. That’s it. If you are a moron, you can still do missions for the landsraad. The game gives to players 5 missions per day that rewards also abilities exp. You can skip a few days and gather a maximum of 35 missions per week. Any more missions than that, still counts for the favor of the house representatives but the player gets NO REWARDS. So I never cared to do a single mission more than I really had to. Nothing to gain and every to lose. Whom do you think had an issue with this? You’ve guessed it! MKos! This god superiority complex moron was demanding of me to keep on doing missions just to help his guild to rank up. You see dear Sleeper, his guild had the impressive number of 18 out of 32 members. You must be in awe now right? Well, hold your horses, other than him as Guild leader, me and my friend, MAYBE 1 or 2 other members were logging in a couple of times per week. Landsraad has this amazing effect on people, nobody cares for it, they get invited to a guild with cyrillic characters, they have this god superiority complex moron dictate to them what to do and they quit the game. I would argue that a hefty percentage of the population in Icarus have quit the game because of MKos. No, I am not saying this to be bitter, I was in front of a lot of arguments, they were in the Russian language but it doesn’t need much intelligence to understand what is going on.
To conclude with the landsraad system, it was a total trash from the start, they revamped it with chapter 3 in order to make by force players to pay attention to it, it is still a garbage system.
-The rewards are really bad most of the time.
-The houses open for the quests early in the morning and get also completed early in the morning. This reduces any and all competition. There are like 100 players in total who are jobless morons and a burden on society who have nothing better to do. Instead of working or be at school, they do the missions early in the morning. By the time people get off work, ALL houses are completed. Sure you can still do missions for your dailies (the 5 per day I have said earlier) or keep spamming missions just to boost your ego for your guild to be in top places, but you do NOT contribute Jack shit to which house won or not.
-In about a year that the devs said it will take for players to max all 5 new abilities, there will be absolutely no reason to keep on doing missions for it. So as sudden as it was shoved down our throats for the abilities, this sudden it will fade to obscurity when people no longer need it.
Chapter: Funcom retarded customer support.
I have been playing MMO games since 2004, now we have 2026, that is 22 years long journey. In every single game I had problems with, their customer support was there to help. Exception to this rule? Funcom.
To this day I have lost 2 times ALL my top tier because of a game bug. In both cases, I have landed next to a fallen ship to loot it. And the “E” key doesn’t work for me to re-enter my ornithopter and fly away. In both cases I was eaten by the Shai Hulud (sandworm) and in both cases I have lost all my gear.
You’d think dear sleeper than funcom would keep logs of the gears of players and transactions and so on. Well, I bet my testicles they do, but it is more convenient for them to just reply “we can’t verify what gear you had on” and they just flip the middle finger.
You see dear funcom, you do have records of my gear, if that wasn’t the case, every time my character would be naked, I wouldn’t have a base or vehicles and so on. So there are records, you choose actively not to help. And it is not because I was reckless and risked it. It was clearly due to a bug, a bug that many players have also reported and is yet to be fixed. You should have the courtesy to help players who have lost their gear due to your bugs. If not to restore their lost gear, then a pack for materials and permits to help them back.
Personally I have been eaten many times by the Shai Hulud for fun, for entertainment, for achievements. I never complained about losing whatever from those cases, I knew what I was doing and what I was risking. But me losing all my stuff because the game doesn’t work? Unacceptable! And ever worse when I ask for help and also to report it as a bug, you just give me the middle finger…
Another incident I want to write about has to do with how I have lost my carrier and ornithopter that I talked much earlier about. I wrote about a person who landed on our carrier out of thin air, no sound, no vehicle on sight. This guy landed on our carrier and started to spam shooting a bazooka point blank to my carrier. I tried to replicate this and I was getting so much damage back that after 2 rockets, I was almost dead. Let’s say he had better gear than me and skills that give more health. That would make it what? 3 hit tops? This guy spammed like 30 if not more and he got 0 damage back, or at least neither of us saw him use any health kit. So I reported this to funcom with the video of the incident. I have tangible proof of a player cheating. Whomever replied from funcom gave me the impression that this player was indeed found guilty of cheating and he was banned. I had blocked this player so if he wasn’t banned I couldn’t see his chats. So one day I am watching a stream from a friend in the same server and I see the name of this exploiter/cheater in the chat. They did NOTHING to him!
Then they wonder why the game is dying!
As you can see in the steamdb graph, the game is dead basically.
Hopefully it will be revived with patch 1.3.20.0 and the split of the 2 deep deserts and the introduction of the self hosted option but as of now that I am writing this, there is no ETA for when this patch be applied, it is on the public test server for people who want to try it out so my guess is 2-3 weeks.
Chapter: Exploits
Dune: Awakening and other games of course, I do not want to single this game out, have the occasional exploits, this game had a few severe glitches.
1 was that people were able to lower the power of active bases by placing ornithopter on top of wind turbines to bring down the shields of a base, then use lasguns to destroy the subfief console, this would give them access to all storage boxes of the affected base. It was a very severe glitch that had the devs roll back a few worlds and compensate players for it.
2 was a money duplication glitch which flooded all worlds with insane amounts of money. To this day, the market prices are insane high, I also took advantage of the situation and sold items at higher prices. To the day the glitch was found, I had about 3.2 million solaris. Right now I am nearly 1 billion spread across 3 characters but even 1 billion is nothing. The top grade items and augmentations play from 1 billion to 10s of billions, so I do not bother with the market at all. I keep on farming my own materials and if I have excess amount of them, try to sell them if the price is right or keep them in the bank’s storage. Funcom said they banned the people who abused this glitch but they didn’t remove the money in circulation. If I knew that wouldn’t remove the money…well I have 3 accounts, I could have sacrificed the 1 to make a few trillions and see the rest of my Dune: Awakening days filthy rich and with everything my heart desired bought without me doing anything!
Oh! If you are new to the game? I feel sorry for you! The prices are so inflated and as new player if you do not spend any solari anywhere, then MAYBE you will have by the end of the story and 200 level about 1.5 million solari. If you have more than that, someone boosted you OR you have participated in the inflated market and sold something for high price.
Verdict for the game
Visuals: 8/10
Music: 9/10
Story: 10/10
Support: 0/10
Griefers: 10/10
Content: 10/10
I will give it a solid 7/10.
It is not a visual masterpiece, it has amazing story, the score is epic, it has a lot of content to play, solo and with friends. But encountering other players, if they are not your friends already or being nice in general then sooner or later, they will be part of the problem. Especially if after the introduction of self hosted servers, people choose to remain on the public servers, then I would certainly have to think that something is wrong with them. Although the split of the Deep Desert is close, people are delusional if they think it will stop griefers. On the contrary, the PvE instance will be the place for griefers to be. Their imagination will be their only limitation on how to disturb and annoy all other players.
And if griefers decide to take a break for a day, the insane amount of noobs with static compactors compacting in one area would be enough to ruin it for everybody.
