As a survival MMO, Funcom's Dune: Awakening really does a lot of things right. Despite technically being designed as a multiplayer experience, for instance, solo players can find even the first 100 hours of Dune: Awakening to be a rewarding, immersive, and worthwhile — albeit arduous — adventure. This is largely due to how demanding the game is, the amount of risk involved in simply setting foot on the open sands, and its persistent and extensive grind for materials and resources. However, no matter how satisfying it may be to play at first, it eventually ends up feeling as empty as the desert it's set in.
That emptiness can be no more seen nor felt than in Dune: Awakening's endgame. On paper, it sounds great. A massive, energetic, faction-based conflict where players are competing for the game's most valuable resources seems like something that should keep them around for the long haul. Unfortunately, that's simply not the case, as it is becoming increasingly apparent that Dune: Awakening's endgame feels more end than game, with a grind that eventually shows its true colors — a tunnel with no light at the end, or a flat desert with no vegetation, no shifts in the sand, and no horizon with potential waiting just over its edge.
Dune: Awakening's Deep Desert Endgame Feels Empty
The Grind Loses Its Grip Once Core Goals Are Met
Dune: Awakening's endgame, like any other live-service game's endgame content, is meant to be something that keeps players coming back regularly, and that is likely still effective for a certain audience. There's a grind there that's even a bit addicting, revolving around controlling the Landsraad through faction politics, where guilds compete for votes to influence weekly decrees. Much of this plays out in Dune: Awakening's Deep Desert, a volatile PvPvE zone that resets weekly, pushing players to build bases, capture control points, and harvest valuable resources.
However, once players are able to secure tier 6 gear and gain reliable access to the Deep Desert, Dune: Awakening's pace changes dramatically — and not in a way that favors its identity. The survival challenges that arguably defined the game before that take a backseat, and they're replaced with incredibly long stretches of repetitive resource farming. Everything in Dune: Awakening's endgame essentially boils down to players running the same spice-harvesting routes over and over, often without needing to evolve their strategy or adapt to changes in gameplay.
Updates Help, but Variety Remains the Missing Ingredient
To be fair, some recent updates to Dune: Awakening have attempted to improve the endgame experience, and there are even more to come. One of the biggest changes saw half of the Deep Desert restricted to PvE-only, with the other half remaining PvP. This was, of course, after many solo and resource-focused players made a loud cry for Dune: Awakening to value them as a community, and Funcom responded in kind. Other updates have addressed issues like ornithopter "goomba stomping" and griefing, while adding new rock island locations to expand the playable space.
However, even with these big, necessary, and welcome steps toward a better endgame experience for Dune: Awakening, variety is still the game's biggest hurdle. There is still no significant shift in objectives once the main gear is unlocked, no major PvE challenges to break up the repetition, and no big story hooks to at least keep players immersed and invested in the inner-workings of the world. The result is an endgame that just feels hollow, despite being somewhat structurally sound, and it's getting increasingly difficult to find a reason to return. That being said, Funcom is making clear strides to offer players a better experience, and with Dune: Awakening now only a little over two months old, its legacy has only just begun, giving it plenty of time to correct its course.
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Open-World, Survival, MMO
