Dune: Awakening is so much more than a survival game or an MMO - it's a unique sci-fi experience shaped by Frank Herbert's 60-year-old lore and all that came after it

gamesradar.com:

I've spent hundreds of hours in Conan Exiles, and hundreds more in similar survival games like Ark, Don't Starve, Grounded, and Valheim, but playing Dune: Awakening made me realize that the formula I've grown so accustomed to over the years isn't necessary to make a genre gem. Funcom's upcoming adaptation of sci-fi star Frank Herbert's decades-old universe isn't afraid to sprinkle some spice into that reliable recipe, and that's why I love it.

While I only spent around eight hours playing the new Dune game, it was enough time to grow properly acquainted with (and genuinely hooked on) the ways that Fucnom's unique MMO-survival blend stands apart from its predecessors. I went into it ready to grapple with pesky hunger bars, translucent building screens, and vicious beasts. Instead, I found sandworms.

Besides the subterranean monsters shaking the ground I walked on, I was also met with a relentless thirst that called for some seriously creative solutions, and an unforgiving desert planet inhabited by ever-warring cultures. This is no Conan Exiles – this is Dune, through and through, in all of its parched, political glory. This was the lore I grew up with, the lore my father grew up with – 60 years of world-building, reimagined for a video game I can't wait to play more of.

Dune: Awakening was originally not a survival-MMO mash-up, just a survival sim "with a good endgame"

While Dune: Awakening aligns itself well with Herbert's books and, of course, Denis Villeneuve's films, it follows its own alternate timeline in which Paul of House Atreides was never born. Lady Jessica instead birthed the daughter she was meant to birth for the Bene Gesserit, which also means that the Duke never died.

It's an exciting spin on the story many of us already know and love, offering Funcom a degree of creative freedom it wouldn't otherwise have. Everything is familiar enough to dedicated Dune fans while also feeling new – a breath of fresh air for the beloved setting. The choices I had