Dune: Awakening has been a long time coming, and it looks like it's got a long way to go still. There's no word yet on even a prospective release date, and the recent gameplay demonstration I attended at Summer Game Fest was strictly hands-off. Yet even in an early state, this survival MMO managed to impress me. It's very much a product of its genre, but one that builds on familiar mechanics to smartly integrate them with franchise lore. It's also astoundingly big.
As a survival game, Dune: Awakening works just as you'd imagine – seek out resources and try not to die. Death will drop some of your equipment's durability, and you'll lose half of whatever inventory stacks you've got. That is unless you get eaten by the sandworm, which causes you to lose everything. An onscreen sound meter will help you keep track of when the worm is likely to show up, giving you a chance to avoid it, but I'm very into the idea of Dune's most iconic idea being a source of so much additional risk.
