The new Dune Awakening trailer, debuted at Gamescom Opening Night Live, showed off its survival gameplay and announced a release window of early 2025. The trailer offers a peak into the general arc of the game. You’ll start Dune: Awakening by creating your character and choosing their background, before crashing into the middle of the planet. Staying out in the desert is perilous. You can get sun stroke and heat exhaustion from standing in the sun, and sandworms will detect you if you run on open ground.
The trailer then showcases taking out an NPC encampment. The game offers multiple strategies and approaches: You can get in close with a blade, attack with guns, block ranged fire with a shield, and even deploy a hunter seeker drone to kill from afar. After the battle ends, you will loot equipment and resources from enemy corpses. For example, you can take enemies’ blood to purify into water back at base.
Build up your base with friends to unlock ways to utilize or refine the resources you gather out in the desert. After you’ve built the stronghold of your dreams, you can make blueprints of your base to recreate elsewhere on Arrakis or to sell to other players.
An ornithopter will let you explore the desert world to fill out your map and discover abandoned space ships, testings sites, and landmarks. In the relative safety of Harko Village, meet up with other players and NPCs or join up with one of Dune’s great houses such as the Harkonnens.
To get real power on Arrakis, however, you’ll have to gather the spice melange: the psychedelic that enables safe space travel. Spice blows can erupt into battles as various factions attempt to take Dune’s most valuable resource. The trailer teases here that you can summon sandworms with a thumper, just like in the movies.
Dune Awakening will launch in early 2025. Xbox and Playstation versions are coming, but have no release date yet.
