Before the launch of the survival MMORPG, Dune: Awakening’s team revealed more about the server and map structure that players will be part of, as well as the game’s primary social features via a livestream.
Dune: Awakening’s servers will have multiple tiers to them. A main server within a region will be called a “world,” with some areas having instances within them called “seiches,” which are essentially instances. Certain other areas will be massively multiplayer, specifically Arrakeen and Harko Village as designated “social spaces,” and the Deep Desert as the primary “massively multiplayer” PvP zone, over 500 squared kilometers large, where endgame content will take place.
There will be seven server regions internationally for Dune: Awakening players to join at launch:
East Coast US
Central US
West Coast US
South America
Europe
Asia
Australia
There will be some number of worlds in each region open for those players who have joined the early launch via purchased packs; more will open upon the full June 10 launch. If the servers get too full, in the meantime, players will be queued in.
Players won’t be entirely locked down into their Dune: Awakening servers by any means, as players will be allowed to visit others. The primary means for server visitation will be through a friend visiting tool, which lets you near-instantly hop onto their server and instance at the nearest trading post. All content will be available to play on these other servers—except building your own base/fief, of course, because that’d be broken as hell for both your power and the server, though you can build on your friends’ fiefs.
As for social features, they’re pretty straightforward for that intersection between survival games and MMORPGs. There’s, of course, a Friends list, onto which players can automatically add friends from their Steam list, which makes that transition easy.
The next size up of groups is, well, Groups, which will be the equivalent of a “party.” Up to four players can join to do content, letting them track each other’s stats and location as they roam for content.
The biggest groups in Dune: Awakening will be Guilds, allowing up to 32 people to link up and share resources. With one owner and officers/moderators allowed in the ranks, the Guild can allow and permit resources and tools such as chests, vehicles, and even doors as they see fit and necessary.
Perhaps the most interesting Guild feature to many, especially roleplayers, will be the house affiliations, as Guilds will be allowed to affiliate with any of the NPC houses and factions, assuming the player responsible has leveled up their own affiliation with that faction adequately. But the Funcom developers imply that joining an opposing faction will have consequences for a player’s own, primarily and especially if the player’s engaging in treachery elsewhere.
All of these details came as part of Funcom’s stream about Dune: Awakening combat, which went over many of the basics including weaponry, skill trees, and NPC capacities. The game launches in full June 10, after a three-week delay announced yesterday, though there’ll be early launch packs before its full 1.0 release.
[Author’s Note: A prior version of this piece had incorrect dates and map sizes; this article has been updated to reflect it correctly.]
