The survival game Dune: Awakening has slipped to only balanced ratings on Steam. Players cite primarily one reason for this in their reviews.
How is Dune: Awakening doing? After the initial hype for the survival game has faded, the ratings for Dune: Awakening on Steam have dropped. While the game has a 73% rating overall, currently only 53% of players give a positive review on Steam.
A clearer picture emerges when comparing reviews from the first week to those from the last week. Dune: Awakening started with 87% positive reviews and is now down to just 50% in the current week. Players explain in their reviews why the survival MMO has worsened over time.
A disappointing endgame
What happens in the endgame of Dune: Awakening? The endgame of the survival MMO was supposed to consist of two aspects, as the developers stated before release.
- The Landsraad system, where players are to undertake tasks for their faction to decide on a change of rules on their server within a political system.
- The Deep Desert, once planned as almost purely a PvP area, offers players the best resources while also risking attacks from hostile players.
While the Landsraad system was discarded as little exciting endgame by many shortly after its inception, all players had to go into the Deep Desert to gather the necessary materials for the final upgrade of their machines.
There, they were often shot down by groups or entire clans of PvP players, resulting in not only their farmed items being destroyed but also their brought aircraft. This frustrating experience has been made increasingly PvE-friendly by the developers through updates; however, many see the entire concept of the Deep Desert as an ill-conceived area that should better be replaced with a PvE-oriented endgame.
What are the players saying? That player ratings have suffered significantly due to the endgame PvP following the initial hype and successful PvE story segment is also noted by players in recent reviews:
- QuikMercury writes on Steam: “The Deep Desert is trash. You get two losers who have nothing better to do than farm everything by launching people into the air with rockets. It has become a pointless game.”
- Wolfdoggie says on Steam: “A fun game, but as a ‘live service’, it cannot sustain itself right now. I enjoyed PvE, building, quests, and so on, but the stuff eventually ends with a cliffhanger. If they had focused their entire development from the start on making it a complete co-op game with a story, it might have been fantastic. But this game was designed as a PvPvE MMO for the long term, which it currently is not. […]”.
- d4french rates the game positively on Steam, but admits: “So you’ve seen all the reviews with over 200 hours of playtime telling you not to buy this game and that the game is essentially over once you’ve built an Ornithopter. The Deep Desert is in an alpha state and lacks depth compared to the Hagga Basin. Cheating is widespread. They are right. […] Without the great people I’ve met, I probably would have also given a negative review.”
- InfiniteAbysS finds on Steam: “It pains me to leave a negative review for this game. For hundreds of hours I enjoyed this game. The role-playing aspect of the Hagga Basin and everything leading to the Deep Desert is fantastic, in my opinion, high-level gaming. Then you reach the Deep Desert and realize that many of the people there don’t intend to play the game and collect resources to build a base. The only reason these people play this game is griefing. They roam in kill squads now referred to as ‘murder vagrants’. […] These people will kill the game.”
The developers of Dune: Awakening have only ensured with the August patch that important endgame resources can now also be found in large quantities in the PvE area. There are now hardly any reasons for players to fly into the PvP area. What has changed, you can find out here: Dune: Awakening receives the major August patch today – all information about server down and patch notes for version 1.1.20.0
