Dune: Awakening features not only elements of MMOs, but also survival-adventure mechanics and more. Read on to find out more about what type of game Dune: Awakening really is.
No, Not Your Traditional MMO
Multiplayer Survival Game on a Massive Scale
Dune: Awakening is not an MMO in the traditional sense, but it is an open-world, multiplayer, survival game made on an immensely larger scale and featuring several typical MMO elements. As shared by developer Funcom themselves on the Dune: Awakening official website, they dropped the MMO label from their one-line description not long after the media preview beta because they saw that most players were setting traditional MMORPG expectations upon the game.
"At its heart, Dune: Awakening is an open world survival crafting game, and while it has many typical MMO features – including the massively multiplayer aspect – it’s important to be clear about what the game is and isn’t," they wrote on a blog post that explained the game’s internal server structure and how its multiplayer mechanics would play out.
Classic Survival Game Made Bigger
Dune: Awakening has the core of a survival-adventure game, with resource management and base-building, as well as being a sandbox. Nothing is level-gated and everything is available to you from the start—if you manage to get resources for the best weapon or the best vehicle earlier on, there’s nothing stopping you from blazing through enemies with overpowered tools.
However, what makes it bigger than your standard multiplayer survival game is its large-scale multiplayer world and equally large multiplayer mechanics. When players first boot up the game, they will be asked to choose a World, and in each World, there is a maximum of 20 smaller servers. Players can then interact with not only players in their own server, but also with people across the 19 other servers in that World through a special map called Social Hubs.
Social gameplay features are similar to those found in MMOs, such as server-wide chats, proximity voice chats, forming parties or groups, interplayer trading, and creating and joining guilds.
Full of MMO Elements
Despite not being labelled as an MMO anymore, it has a lot of familiar MMO elements that any gamer would know. While the game is technically a sandbox, there is still character progression and an overarching storyline, as well as a world that has a lot of activities for players to do. NPCs can be talked to freely with branching dialog trees, each with their own set of unique missions. Dungeons (or called Imperial testing stations in game) can be tackled alone or with a party that can be recruited through the server-wide chat or with your friends.
In lieu of classic singular classes where all skills will be from one certain class tree, Dune: Awakening’s system lets players customize their own skill set. Players can choose between multiple player archetypes called Schools of the Imperium where they can mix and match from a number of passive and active abilities. "Our goal has been to create a combat system that goes beyond what you can expect from survival open world crafting games, both in terms of quality and combat options, not to mention synergies between archetypes and their abilities."
Source:
Server Structure and Large-Scale Multiplayer Mechanics Explained
