Dune Awakening promises an endgame overhaul and says communication has been bad because developers had 'state mandated' vacations

Dune Awakening developer Funcom has issued a new update with its roadmap and future plans for the MMO. Oddly enough it begins with a mea culpa: "I apologize if people feel the communication around issues with the game has been lacking; we are focused on improving this. With a percentage of the team having their well earned (and state mandated) vacations, customer service and the community team have not always had access to developers who can answer their every question."

Those pesky devs and their state mandated vacations! That's what you get when you're a Norwegian developer that's now owned by Tencent. The post goes on to boast about how much Funcom has actually been doing while seemingly doing nothing, which is par for the course with an MMO: "banned thousands of cheaters, fixed a bunch of duplication and exploit bugs" and so on.

There are also a bunch of quality of life improvements arriving soon. Players will be able to "rename vehicles, storage containers, and other placeables" while ornithopter rockets will be more reliable for the "combat enthusiasts", alongside the "highly requested option to swap seats in a vehicle with a hotkey."

But the big thing, the main player gripe, is Dune Awakening's endgame.

"During summer we’ve made changes and tweaks to the formula of the Deep Desert—with varying degrees of success. We have attracted very different demographics to the game and they are asking for very different things."

The main complaint among players, by a distance, is the lack of endgame content and the sheer grind of it all. Funcom lists a few other concerns and says there are short-term and long-term improvements in the works. The things that are "coming quickly" include:

• Improved Player Logging—One of the key frustrations we see is the lack of information and clarity around why certain items/objects/vehicles are gone. We will increase the information in your logs so that you have a better idea of what is going on. For example, listing the names of people who take things from chests in your base.
• Vehicle Salvaging System—We’re working on a vehicle salvaging system that will allow you to recover lost vehicles.
• Cobalt Paste/Vehicle Inventory—We’re adjusting the volume of the infamous cobalt paste and adding more slots to the Assault Ornithopter vehicle inventory. We will be adding a cargo container that can be carried by the Carrier Ornithopter.
• Instanced Deep Desert Loot—The constant camping and queuing of the Deep Desert Testing Stations leads to a frustrating experience where people arrive at an empty Testing Station. We’re going to change these to be more in line with the rest of the game.
• Offline Notifications about important events—We understand that not everybody can or wants to log in to check power/taxes constantly in the game. We would like to create a notification service that sends you the status of your base via email. This one is squarely aimed at you, Ben.

The reference to Ben is about one of Dune Awakening's early meme-y moments, when the community got rather invested in one player's failure to check their base power: thankfully, Ben did eventually turn up.

But this is all short-term stuff. "The Landsraad is supposed to be the endgame activity driver," says Funcom. "Currently it does not have the breadth or depth of content or progression to serve that function."

The Landsraad is essentially how Dune Awakening does politics: players align themselves to either the Atreides or Harkonnen faction, compete in tasks, and use victories to enact decrees that are then applied server wide. It's a very neat idea, and thematically perfect for Dune, but right now… no-one's happy with it.

Funcom says it's going to be "systematically building out the Landsraad with a greater variety of activities" and that these "will become contract based, rather than delivery based, which will allow us to effectively remove the issue of stockpiling that is currently endemic in the game."

One of the big issues is repetition. Funcom offers a list which "contains examples, and not promises" of what it's working on: "Assassinations, Treasure Maps, Races, Construction Challenges, Duels, Faction vs Faction maps, Improved control points, Scavenger Hunts, Temporary Crafting Challenges etc."

But that's all long-term, and with no timeframe on such additions players may well wonder why they should bother sticking around. It's all well and good to say that once all the above is done "we will then transition the Deep Desert back towards the original intention" of a spice-obsessed sandbox of cut-throat combat: but when?

"A lot of this will become our focus in the latter half of 2025," is the answer. Meanwhile there will be more details about the free Chapter 2 update and the paid Lost Harvest DLC at Gamescom, which Funcom emphasises are not focused on the endgame because they "were planned and began development before launch."