One of the most captivating parts of the second Dune: Awakening Direct covered the server structure, map sizes, and the current state of the beta. This article also incorporates additional insights from the latest dev blog (What makes Dune: Awakening an MMO?) on the game’s official website.
Hagga Basin: Your Starting Point in Dune: Awakening
You won’t select a single server when you begin your journey in Dune: Awakening. Instead, you’ll enter a shared world of server clusters, each hosting several hundred players depending on the region. Your adventure starts in the Hagga Basin, a map roughly the size of Conan Exiles‘ world map (about 64 square kilometers) with 40 players or more. This area is designed primarily for survival gameplay, featuring PvE elements with some designated PvP zones.
The Shield Wall, the significant rock formation, traverses the Hagga Basin. Behind this natural barrier, players can craft and build personal home bases safe from devastating storms. The Hagga Rift, also within this map, is a PvP area known from the Summer Game Fest, featuring an embedded ecology lab. Multiple instances of Hagga Basin can exist within the game world, allowing players from different servers to interact, socialize, and team up for guild activities.
The Overland Map: Expanding Your Horizons
After crafting your first ornithopter and departing Hagga Basin, you’ll enter the “overland map” of Arrakis’ northern hemisphere. This overland map connects large, separate maps, facilitating real-time player movement between locations such as Hagga Basin, social hubs, and the Deep Desert. Traveling on this map requires fuel and water, and running out of these resources triggers survival scenarios where players must scavenge to continue.
The overland map allows Funcom to add new maps across Arrakis without needing to place them adjacent to each other, offering more creative freedom in expanding the game world.
Social Hubs: Gathering Points for Players
Cities and villages in Dune: Awakening function as social hubs, where building, driving vehicles, and PvP are restricted. These areas serve as gathering points for players to interact with NPCs, vendors, and fellow players from different servers within the same world. When these hubs reach capacity, new instances are created to accommodate more players.
The video highlights Harko Village, the primary social hub for the Harkonnen, featuring the Hanovars bar with its impressive whale skeleton. It also shows us the kulon, a wild donkey originally from Earth’s Asiatic steppes. Adapted for Arrakis by the Fremen and smugglers, these animals have high water needs despite modified stillsuits, making them costly to maintain.
Arrakeen, the social hub of House Atreides, has only been shown in artwork so far.
The Deep Desert: An Expansive Frontier
Joel Bylos shared details about the immense size of the deep desert map in Dune: Awakening, which spans more than 500 square kilometers. To help illustrate this scale, we created a comparison diagram that includes the sizes of worlds from other famous games and even a real-world country.
In the diagram, the deep desert map is larger than Barbados’s entire country, weighing about 430 square kilometers. The Hagga Basin map from Dune: Awakening is also highlighted, covering 64 square kilometers, comparable in size to the worlds of Conan Exiles and GTA V.
This comparison not only underscores the vastness of the deep desert but also puts it into perspective by showing it alongside other large game worlds such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (256 km²), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (136 km²), and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (37 km²). The sheer size of the deep desert map offers players an expansive area to explore, making Dune: Awakening one of the most ambitious and large-scale game environments ever created.
Dedicated Servers: No Single-Player Mode
Due to its extensive MMO features, Dune: Awakening does not include a single-player mode. Players will need to join servers to play. While Funcom aims to support private servers, at least for the Hagga Basin map, this feature may not be available at launch.
Beta Update: Persistent Testing
Joel Bylos announced that the game had entered a persistent closed beta status, allowing testers to access the game 24/7 and experience all its features, including a revamped combat system, survival gameplay, joining factions, exploring the Deep Desert, and engaging in the political system. Gamescom will be the next major event to showcase more gameplay throughout the year.
Fans can rejoice as more and more players are being accepted for the Dune: Awakening closed beta.
Rewatch the Dune: Awakening Direct 2
DuneAwakening.com – Dev Blog 3: What makes Dune: Awakening an MMO?
