Played a bit of Dune Awakening and wanted to share *thoughts*

[ululator]

I have played a bit of the dune awakening trial. Interesting game in how dated it feels. It's good by like 15 year old standards. The main gist seems to be a linear gear treadmill with the endgoal to get your flying mount, it screams WoW design out of every pore.

You cant build off grid for the foundation sections, which is a big downer.

The gunplay feels like playing spec ops the line. Hitscan the man standing still or running at you.

There are plenty cool and well made ingredients to the game though, you really wonder how it could have been done better, so I wanted to dump some thoughts here. Yes, it's one of those "I wish this game did XYZ" posts.

There is a tension of scales to open world games that's really tough. You want people to spend more time doing stuff than just running around. If you want people starting out to not feel lost, run out of things to do or the right resource and soft lock themselves, you put resources and things to do in every cranny. But then nothing can have appropriate scale. You can't put a castle or megastructure around every corner and even if you did, those would need to be barely populated.

In Vintage Story, one of the most common beginner questions is 'where is my [ore xyz]'. There is a big difference in progression from finding the right ore early, and knowing how to best look for it. A metrics headed game designer would hate it, "this guy was stuck in the copper age for 10 hours!".

In VS they actually do spawn surface copper everywhere to not have people stuck in the stone age, but they have the other ores underground, some depending on biome, so you need to journey a lot or use prospecting really well. But the crucial thing that makes that not as bad is that there are multiple parallel resource progressions. You don't strictly need iron to have a fun time, it just unlocks some new mechanics, makes some less tedious, and others are perfectly doable without.

Being gently pushed back by the game like this, encouraging you to play the other games in the game instead of a linear combat/quest progression is the coolest thing Vintage Story does. There's a skill degree to finding ores that just would not work if the ores were a true progression blocker, it would be too tedious to learn and do.

So far I don't feel like Dune is as smart at enabling the parallel aspect. As an example, I feel like it would never enable someone who does not want to do combat to be able to make maximum sized structures (it's currently a costly high tier thing).

I should just be allowed to make a big structure at the edge of the map. Have the map be bigger and put the current quest/resource density on a curve within it. Although, the map scale is probably better outside the starting area. It is designed for people without a sand bike after all. Structures on the edge of the map could also have reduced upkeep, reducing the need for complicated solutions.

Anyway, I am going to play some more now.

[ululator]

Game's quite nice once you get to drive around a bit, the starting area was indeed just too cramped.

I like the little secrets they stick around in places. The combat locations can feel a bit straightforward and samey, but a hidden chest feels like a LD saying hello, it's nice.

All in all it seems like a fun PvE game with friends. Solo it's got a bit too much of that too straightforward open world or barren MMO feel to it. It reminded me of that Mad Max game.

I dont really see how it can extend its life into an endgame for those uninterested in the PvP thing. I heard they're very aware and rebuilding it. I wonder if they can catch some of the appeal of later game Vintage Story or Minecraft, where it becomes more about building.

The building feels at odds with a lot of the other design, it seems everything about it is restrained as to not have ugly player housing cubes all over the place. I did see some ugly cubes but on the other hand, I did not see a single player while playing. On a sunday, on the third day of a free trial.

What does not help is that they require making sealed rooms for a base so they can LOD out the interior crafting tables etc. It makes sense, but it also causes a lot of people to just make a cube and then stop.

They might have restrained the player numbers per server a bit too much in order to keep the number of player houses down.

Currently it looks like the housing is the only thing that is preventing a server meshing kinda approach, where unpopulated servers could be merged with more populated ones.

I think they should introduce sietches for people who just want to have a functional base somewhere. Have them buildable underground on a lot of fixed locations throughout the map. They could then instance the sietches from their entrance or something.

I hope they'll introduce some mechanics that would persistently change a map outside of just housing. Like, have a little community project rebuilding an NPC sietch and set up trading routes that need regular defending and escorts. I never played MMOs that tried stuff like that so idk how that works out but I think it would be a great fit for the game.