Awakening’s Silence Speaks Louder Than Words

Summary

Dune: Awakening offers an immersive MMO experience with a focus on survival in the harsh world of Arrakis.
The game prioritizes atmosphere over dialogue, creating a tense and authentic Dune experience.
Players will often feel isolated due to limited NPC interactions, emphasizing the unforgiving nature of the desert.

Funcom’s Dune: Awakening is officially here, and players are finally spending their first few dozen hours just trying to get a foothold in the unforgiving desert of Arrakis. With its unique blend of original Dune-themed survival elements and the well-oiled formula of a successful MMO, Dune: Awakening truly does feel like an experience worthy of the name tied to Frank Herbert’s iconic sci-fi universe. Perhaps more than anything else, though, Dune: Awakening offers players an incredibly immersive and accurate depiction of the world of Dune, and if there’s anything it needed to get right, it’s that.

As not just a survival game but also an MMO, there are likely certain expectations that come with Dune: Awakening in terms of it being an online multiplayer game. Most MMOs, as the genre’s name suggests, are designed to feel densely populated, whether by NPCs standing by with quests or countless other players all attempting to clear out the same enemy outpost or filling the chat with relentless antics and pleas for help. However, even on its most heavily populated servers, Dune: Awakening still feels quiet, but that’s all a part of what makes it such an immersive experience.

Dune: Awakening Review

Dune: Awakening thrives in atmosphere, worldbuilding, and survival depth, even if its combat and grind somewhat drag behind its setting and systems.

Dune: Awakening Lets the Silence Do the Talking

Immersion Through Isolation

While it’s important that Dune: Awakening nails the survival and MMO elements that define these two genres, as an extension of an established and beloved IP, what matters even more is that it represents that IP as faithfully as possible. For something like Dune, this ultimately boils down to Dune: Awakening‘s portrayal of Arrakis, despite the fact that the game takes place in an alternate universe where Paul Atreides was never born. In light of that daunting task ahead of it, Dune: Awakening must make players feel like they’re on their own in the expansive, harsh desert, and it does so by limiting the player’s interactions with NPCs and other players.

Even on its most heavily populated servers, Dune: Awakening still feels quiet, but that’s all a part of what makes it such an immersive experience.

There are certainly plenty of NPCs populating Dune: Awakening‘s unforgiving world, but they are more or less butter scraped over too much bread. Friendly NPCs reside primarily in tradeposts and main hub areas, but these occupy a very small portion of square footage in Dune: Awakening‘s Arrakis. For the most part, as players are making their way through the game’s story and its crafting tiers, they’ll be on their own in the deserts — unless, of course, they happen to join up with other players. Even that is a bit of a luxury in Dune: Awakening, however.

Atmosphere Over Conversation

In other words, this means that dialogue is also very limited in Dune: Awakening, at least, after its early hours. Where most RPGs rely on exposition and dialogue to communicate tone or build connection, Dune: Awakening strips much of that away in favor of atmosphere. The silence between events, whether it be the quiet when walking across open dunes, the faint hum of distant machinery, or the low rumble that hints at one of Dune: Awakening‘s massive sandworms moving beneath the surface, all take precedence as the game’s main storyteller.

This is what allows Dune: Awakening to feel like such a tense and harrowing experience, and therefore more like an authentic Dune video game. There is little comfort to be found on Arrakis, and the stillness of the world only brings that reality closer. Even if Dune: Awakening didn’t have any dialogue at all, it might still feel just as dangerous, just as informative, and just as immersive. It’s just proof that sometimes less is more, and silence can be more valuable than solaris in a game like Dune: Awakening.