I've Seen The Dune MMO! (Exclusive Preview)

Hello everyone, welcome back, we recently got an early look at Dune Awakening, the upcoming survival sandbox MMO from Conan Exile and Secret World developer funcom. This was a hands-off event, meaning we unfortunately weren't able to play the game, but we did watch a 30-minute presentation and gameplay tutorial during which we not only saw the game running in action, but also got a ton of new insights. information and details. Let's take a look to open things up by showing off the first parts of the game, starting with Character creation makes an Awakening skin to offer the expected set of customization options with sliders for your height, body parts, face, hair , eyes and other features, the general appearance of the characters appeared and was also said to be directly inspired by the recent Dune films and can write. from seeing that in how the characters are designed and their presentation and all that, so after you decide what you look like, you can choose your backstory and starting class, now the backstory includes where you were born and your cast, what It determines things like your unique dialogue traits and emotes, the dialogue trait provides additional options when talking to NPCs, so think like Bethesda style here, where you'll receive different answers to questions NPCs ask you depending on your backstory, your story. choose your birthplace, all that and then there are the classes, now there were four options to choose from from what we saw, so there was Menat, which is all about Recon and strategy, their starting ability is evaluating weapons, which allows them scanning enemies and objects in the environment gives information about them, then there was the soldier class, which has to do with offensive and demolition, its initial ability.

The Shiga wire is basically a hook, you shoot a rod but it sticks to a surface and then pulls you towards it, then there was the sword. master class which is about aggression in close quarters, their initial deflection ability makes them go into a defensive stance to deflect ranged attacks and then the final class was acolyte Benny Jesser which is about physical dominance and manipulation, their initial ability is voice forcing, which uses voice to force someone to approach your position from afar, so it seems like they're using different, clear archetypes here to suit different playstyles. After they finished creating a character, there was a series of cutscenes at the end of which we see the player wake up.

Inside a cave, now here you review the typical basic survival game tutorial, which introduces you to the fundamentals of movement combat. Collection and processing. Here are some notes of what we saw. The first item you pick up in the game is called the FR kit. is a backpack that also acts as a mobile crafting station that allows you to build your starting weapons, tools, and consumables. All the usual stuff here. Collect resources in the environment. Use them to create items at the beginning. You can make it as an improvised melee weapon. There is a light bar.

For better seeing in the dark, as well as the ability to heal with bandages, there is also a radial wheel in the game so you can place items so you can quickly swap between them. These also appear to be bound to keys with eight total slots available in the game. Features a free climbing system where you can climb anywhere you can climb. We were told that all the structures and terrain in the game, the developer actually specifically said that they brought in the climbing system that was created for Conan Exiles and then combined it with a number of additional features like suspender belts and grappling hooks that They allow much more freedom of movement.

Beyond just climbing walls on your way out of the cave, we then saw another cutscene, now they made note here that the game has a pretty big emphasis on the story. There are a lot of cutscenes and dialogue that take place as you play through. the main story quest line that plays out before reaching the end of the game, after that we saw the player in the middle of the arena, which then introduced us to a few more survival mechanics, so they said that when You are among the

dune

s walking on open sand, any movement or action will attract the attention of the sandworms.

At that moment we saw one of those sandworms emerging right behind the player. Clearly, a cutscene was set up for this moment, but now it's just the introduction to the hot sand mechanic again. Beyond avoiding worms, you also have to monitor your heat level at all times, so any time you spend standing in direct sunlight adds up quickly. this temperature gauge and once the bar is full you get the sunstroke debuff which then quickly drains your water and finding water and maintaining your water levels seems to be one of the main survival mechanics in this game so They say you're going to want to stay out of the sun, you'll need to look for water and water can be found in several sources.

You will be able to extract water from plants up to a certain level and then you will need to consume it. pure water or get water from the blood of wildlife NPCs and other players, there is also resource gathering, as you expect, you will collect resources from things in the environment, as well as the ability to recover materials from metal objects using this tool called cutting matrix and In fact, they have chosen to use one of the more interactive forms of gathering, so instead of just saying click e to collect materials from something in front of you, it scans any object that can be collect, this will reveal your weak points as a line. and then you have to follow that line to collect materials and they mentioned that as you progress in the game, the rarer materials will have more complex patterns for you to track.

Next, we need to take a look at the enemy outpost. locations that will be full of valuable loot resources. Collectibles and of course NPCs so you can stalk them and take them out, and this is where things get interesting for me because I love clearing out enemy camps and pretty much any open world game, any survival game, whatever. the kind of game systems that I really like to interact with, uh, before we dive into that, though here's a quick word from today's sponsor. Today's video is sponsored by Marvel Rivals, a new competitive PvP shooter based on superhero teams where you can choose from a wide variety. from iconic Marvel characters, from the Guardians of the Galaxy to the Avengers, the , there is a character.

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Be sure to check out the link in the description below. Right now, let's talk about NPC bases and games. At this point in the fight, they actually switched to another character showing us a different class in action. They had created what was called a passive suspension belt and this basically allowed them to glide or float whenever they jumped into the air from an object. What was great about this. However, this action actually preserves momentum so we saw the player use a grappling hook to quickly pull them towards the ledge and then they activated the suspender belt which made them slide carrying that momentum which basically launched them into the air allowing them to go. further than they otherwise could if they had used the life of the grappling hook to see these types of traversal mechanics more interesting and engaging.

In fact, at this point, the developer said that their goal was to try to make traversal fun and engaging because moving around the environment is one of the things you'll do the most, besides collecting crafts and doing combat, you'll spend a lot of time moving around, so using these tools and abilities combined with the free climbing system gives players the ability to approach as many encounters as they want and they said, as an example, you know there's going to be a lot of outposts like these outcrops or rock formations. , so yes, you can enter the main door of the outpost and start taking out enemies, head on or you can climb and fall from above by sneaking or you know how you want to approach, but they want to have a lot of variety and at the same time make the tour feels appealing instead of just climbing a rock wall, you have the grappling hook.

You have the ability to levitate and other different class abilities that you can use to play more attractive and dynamic traversal mechanics. Once inside The Outpost, we got to see some combat and action, so the player sneaked around a bit. in a crouching position moving stealthily around the base before taking out this Mala pistol to take out some patrolling guards, so the character we saw was actually the soldier class and they had the grappling hook ability as well as now a normal fragmentation grenade. At this point, we were told that in addition to whatever ranged and melee weapons you use in combat at any given time, you can select three active abilities and three passive abilities to currently have equipped from a variety of options, there are classes as we mentioned. with those classes come skill trees and from those trees you can choose whatever you want, although you choose a starting class, it seems that you have the option to draw skills, active and passive skills, from the other class trees as well.

I guess there's some kind of limitation, like maybe you can only fully specialize in your starting class, but you can still pick up some of the early skills in the other tech trees and the combat they showed seemed pretty good now, nothing really stood out either. Better or worse, I will say that I thought the impact sounds and animations, like the way enemy AI reacted to being hit and shot in combat, looked decent, if anything on the downside. I would say that the character's movement seemed a little stiff. It doesn't really look bad by any means, but it did look a little stiff, that's something I took note of while watching this overall, although it did seem pretty fun to watch the character move around the environment, sneak around, take out enemy NPCs with ranged weapons . and melee using his skills throwing grenades seemed competent seemed like it would be a relatively fun time after spending a bit of time in the soldier class, then they went back to the original character showing us the Menat class in action and how they could approach the shot in a outpost, you had access to this ability called battlefield calculation, which was more or less an area scan that marks NPCs showing you their location and their class archetype, whether it's assault support, whatever. after scanning the enemies he then summoned a hunter seeker. which is basically a drone that you control manually and have an ability that is capable of shooting any of the basic enemies in the game.

Now moving forward, we have player bases and building, so we were introduced to the base building system they talked about. They took the base of what Conan Exiles did, tried to identify some of its flaws and then refined it into a better version for ding Awakening, so to start you place a totem on the ground and this basically marks the area in which you can build at that point you can do the typical base building stuff. You'll place foundations, walls, doors, stairs, and roofs in any configuration you want. They are using a hologram system for the construction of the base.

So how this works is you select a build piece and place it and then a hologram appears at that point. This hologram can be filled and completed by anyone who provides the resources. This is a great multiplayer method of building bases. I've loved it in other survival games. This idea is You can lay out the template and then your teammates, working together, can help complete it instead of people having to make each piece individually. You also have access to a special tool that allows you to make blueprints of any building in the game, so what they said is that you can copy aexact structure you like, if you see a structure in the environment you can copy it and then it allows you to place it somewhere else in the world and then just fill in the parts of the hologram yourself, this even allows you to make things like pre-built structures that you can take with you while traveling and drop them to fill them quickly.

This will be especially useful in PvP zones where you don't want to spend a lot of time manually building a base piece by piece, you can go to a PvP Zone with an established PvP structure, place it and then quickly fill it with resources whenever you have them again instead of trying build it by hand while also trying to keep an eye out for other players creating lots. From different brewing and refining stations, pretty much what you expect, there will be various purifiers, manufacturers, refineries and storage. As you level up in the game you will earn these tech points and then those points will be spent on a tech tree that unlocks the various crafting stations, in addition to the tech tree we were also told that there will be unique schematics that will only be found by explore and loot in the open world and they will include things like better versions of certain items, so if you go out and find one of these rare schematics, this will allow you to be one of the few players to create said item or vehicle or whatever and then You will be able to take those items you make with those rare schematics and sell them.

In the Player Trading Post we were able to see some of the dynamic world events in the game. These include things like damaged spaceships and transports that will fall from the sky. They will leave a trail of thick black smoke. They will carry unique and valuable resources that are not found anywhere. Otherwise, you'll want to go out and rescue them every time you see one of these ships crashing into the Sands. However, this will also attract things like sandworms and other players which they said are used to create these tense situations where you will see this ship crash and you will want to go to it to get its valuable resources, but you will have You have to be careful if the sandworm caught your attention enough and if they come, whether other players come to kill you or not. even just to fight you, but even other players compete to harvest the limited resources that are on the ship that just crashed again, everyone used to try to create these tense dynamic moments, other things they have for events include during the night, they are these large military ships that scan the planet for escaped prisoners, which is you, so you will have to pay attention to where these ships are and when they pass by, and you must avoid this huge search light because if you get if you see it, they will send an elite squad of NPCs to try and take you out and I guess if you're good enough you'll be able to deal with them and there will probably be some nice rewards for doing so as well and then of course another big reward.

The event you will have to deal with is the sandworms. They said that these exist as a constant threat throughout the game. You can't escape from them and you can't beat them because they are not a real boss. You can fight the only thing you have. What you can try to do is avoid them and escape if you catch their attention, so as we mentioned above, when you move in Open Sands, anything you do while you are in this space will attract the sandworm's attention now that you are. You'll still want to go out to the Open Sands because there's a lot of valuable resources and loot there from those shock ships, but also from the spice flowers, so there's a threat meter every time you're in the Sands that basically gives you a cue. how much attention you are attracting from the sandworms, once this gets high enough the sandworm will appear, you will actually see it come out of the sand making a loud commotion, so if you don't see it if it's like it explodes behind From you, if you don't physically see it at first, you will definitely hear it, you turn around and see the sandworm as if emerging from the sands and then at that point it chases you like a shark skimming the surface. of the water is chasing you with its mouth wide open and the only thing you can do is try to escape, you can't outrun it, although it is faster than you can potentially be, so you would have to get in an aerial vehicle and fly. far away or try to enter the various rock outcrops, basically islands of rock that are separated from the sand and the sandworms cannot enter the Rock, so they can chase you in the sand, but if you make it to the Rock, you are safe and that's basically the mechanic you're dealing with, they said there are items in the game, like these Thumpers, that can be used to distract the worms;

However, once a worm alerts you and starts chasing you, your only option is to run, they follow you at high speed, skimming the surface with their mouths wide open until they catch up with you or until you escape to the safety of one of these islands. rocky Next, the developer mentioned the fact that they are calling this. game an MMO they said, hey, people ask us all the time why we call this game an MMO, what makes it an MMO and to which they said the game is a series of connected servers that are seamlessly interconnected with each other and some These include social server areas, like these things known as player hubs, this seems to me very similar to how things like the tower work in Destiny.

Here you will see a lot of other people running, this is where, plus others. people, you'll also find Quest NPC trainers, merchants, guilds, and player auction house factions, and that was pretty much all he said on the matter, he didn't go into further detail about what other MMO items he has now, of course. From this I get the impression that outside of social hubs, all zones in the game will use phasing, so they will have a limit set for the number of people you will be able to see on your particular version of that zone's server and then you will likely in PvP zones allow for a higher player cap to allow for that large scale PvP combat that they've talked about, but otherwise it will be somewhat limited in PvE zones, you know, at this point, most MMOs.

Nowadays we use something like this, we rarely see these locked chunks that only have one player limit set and then everyone on that server sees all the other players on that server, we see a lot more phases that you can get into one. zone and you will see people in that zone on your version of the server, but maybe your friends could also be in that zone, but you won't see them unless you group up with them or maybe the game does it dynamically. that anyone on your friends list always appears in the zone, but it's phased, they're not server fragments, that's my guess from what you described here, the next interesting thing we saw were these Ecco labs, now they were described as equivalent to dungeons.

In other games of this, the developer said that he likes to think of them like the vaults in Fallout, they have been sealed for 10,000 years and when war broke out in the game's story, people started exploring more and as a result, they started to unlock. and discover these locations, so yes, they are like dungeons, they will be different areas where you will enter, eliminate enemies and collect loot, sometimes they will be bosses, sometimes you will enter and they will be inhabited by tons of NPCs. of various enemies, other times they will not be bothered and instead will give you various new and interesting experiments, puzzles and obstacles for you to try to overcome and they said here that this gives them the space to play with different ideas and locations to the standard deserts.

Upstairs we introduced new landscapes and environments that aren't just sand everywhere, in fact in the only eco lab they showed us, it was like a tundra themed place, there was a ton of ice and snow and freezing everywhere, so yeah, these Ecco Labs will allow them to offer an experience that's not just sand everywhere, which I think is really good because that's probably one of the concerns that people had with this game, like how interesting will it be? explore the desert for 100 hours well, with the Eco laabs they can offer biomes and locations that aren't just sand and rock and sand and rock, so that's good, there was a combat stretch here, we saw a few minutes of combat with two characters . working together this also showed off some different abilities we saw the mentat class use this ability which revealed the enemy's health bars as well as what abilities the enemies had we saw a suspensor grenade which made enemies trapped inside float suspended in the air and then we saw the Menat class also uses this ability like Dash or flicker style where they teleport towards an enemy and then the last thing we saw was an example of searching for spices, so spices are at the heart of Everything in this game is a super valuable resource.

It is used for many things, it is a currency, so you actually use spices to pay your taxes on the land and the base you have built, but also spices are used for some class skills as you progress and become more and more powerful. so spices have to be harvested in the desert and that's one of the things that draws you to the Sands, so at this point we saw a couple of players get ready and go out to harvest one of these spice blowing places, So first they built a transport ornithopter that allows them to pick up and fly a spice harvester to a nearby Bloom.

The reason you want to do this is because the spice harvester is a ground vehicle and moves quite slowly and if you were to simply drive the harvester over the sand, you would never reach the bloom before attracting the attention of the sandworm and being swallowed. entire, so you use the transport thopter, go up and pick up the Harvester and then fly the Harvester towards the hit that allows you to then fall. Lower the Harvester and start harvesting, so while one player was doing that, the other player was up in the ornithopter flying in the sky and just scouting for enemy players that might be coming, paying attention to see if there were any signs of a sandworm coming, but then Also at that time, while they were harvesting this location, we saw a sandstorm appear on the horizon that was moving very quickly towards the players.

Now obviously this was a pre-arranged event, but it's supposed to be dynamic while you're playing and sandstorms while you're playing. It Will Pass You don't want to get caught in the sandstorm because if you're not protected it will kill you, so what happened was when the sandstorm came we saw the ornithopter pick up the Harvester, suspend it in the air and then start flying. in the opposite direction of the sandstorm trying to hide, but of course it wouldn't be dramatic if they weren't swallowed by Hol, then the sandstorm came in and enveloped them in Fade to Black and that was the end of the performance again.

Clearly this was prescribed, it's not like a sandstorm came by chance, you know, they set this up to happen, but it will be dynamic in the game, i.e. Assumption, you will periodically receive sandstorms coming from different directions. You'll get some kind of warning, I guess, or there'll be a big V-shaped visual indicator to let people prepare and then they'll have to try to cover as quickly as possible, so that's the whole presentation, basically, it's a summary. Again, this was a presentation of the game, so we were seeing the game in action, where these various aspects are shown.

U my first impressions of what we saw, you know, understanding that we didn't actually play, we didn't. get hands-on time, but from what we saw in the presentation, some of the advantages, uh, for starters, visually, I think the game actually looks pretty good, it's a far cry from the original presentation, the trailers for the original game that We saw from this game where I thought it looked a little muddy and flat. This thing runs on Unreal Engine 5 and it's pretty obvious from the textures and lighting in particular. I thought this game was visually pretty good. I will also say that the particular build we looked at seemed to be a pretty solid performer.

I didn't see any obvious frame drops or performance issues at any point during the presentation. Now, of course, this was a pre-arranged presentation. We also have no idea what hardware the game was running on. They were using a pretty high-end platform, but still in a lot of these presentations, no matter what hardware they're using, you can still see pretty obvious performance issues in the early versions of the games and no such thing happened in this presentation. what we saw here. I also liked some of the various systems and features they showed off. I like this, like the interactive pickup where you really have to follow this line.

I liked the various threats in the environment, the dynamic world events involving the sandworm, the sandstorms, you know, the falling ships. From the sky, this all looks and sounds really cool, having to avoid the sun and stay in the shadows like some systemsreally interesting, to keep the player interested and alert while exploring the open world. I thought the skills we saw were cool. I wasn't sure what to expect. I'm not very familiar with the world of Dune, but I wasn't sure how interesting the RPG-style skills and abilities we'd have access to would be, but we saw a levitate. we saw anti-gravity stuff we saw area scans we saw drones so it looks like if you're a fan of open world RPGs they have a decent variety of abilities here which is nice to see on the other hand there were a few things like I mentioned a few of the animations in particular when it comes to movement and parts of combat seemed a bit stiff again.

I wouldn't say it looked terrible, just that the animations felt a little stiff, it still might feel good to play. I have no reason to suppose that it will not be so. I thought the gunplay looked and sounded decent, but yeah, just a little stiff here and there, that would be one of the first criticisms. Also, the way they describe the elements of the MMO clearly won't be. a full-fledged MMO, more of a shared open-world survival game. I think we expected that, but now it looks like we have a pretty decent confirmation, my guess again will be that in PvP zones when there is PvP conflict between warring Factions or guilds or whatever, it will be the highest density of players in a location, but as you explore all the other areas of the game it will probably be quite limited due to whatever phasing tech they use and speaking of which, it didn't show any large scale combat, what they call combined arms, where you have hundreds of players running fighting on foot with weapons and melee skills along with all the ground and air vehicles.vehicles and the explosions and the tanks and all that stuff, we didn't see any of this at all, it was all really refined in the perspective of one or two players playing in a group plus them walking around the Social Hub which we didn't see. any open world exploration or combat with more than one or two people and we definitely didn't see that large scale Guild fight they're selling this game on so maybe they're saving it for future demos, maybe it's just not there still. maybe in the current version it won't work well, who knows, but yeah, I'd like to see it because that's one of the main selling points they're releasing for this game, but yeah, there you go, that's the

preview

we took .

A look at one of the first

exclusive

Dune Awakening viewing events. I like what I see in general, as always. Hey man, I'm excited waiting for new games and I hope this one is good, as is always the case, but that will do. This video, thanks as always, I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you next time, okay, take it easy.