I started playing Dune: Awakening in the summer of 2025.
Many of my IRL friends were really hyped for the game, and I joined them.
Almost instantly, I got completely hooked.
Whether it was the story, progression, building, or simply having new things to work towards, there was always something to get excited about. With my group of friends, we started a guild that grew pretty quickly, with friends of friends joining as well.
Everything was pretty awesome, and the grind was surprisingly satisfying, even though I usually do not like grindy games.
We were on Discord almost every day and evening playing together, and eventually we reached the Deep Desert. By that point, we were completely hooked.
We are all grown men with families and jobs — pilot, doctor, engineer and more — yet we were literally waking up in the middle of the night just to try to secure the best spots in the DD after the storm.That should probably say something about how invested we were.
We represented House Atreides and enjoyed both the PvE and PvP aspects of the game.
After we built our first Carrier and Spice Crawler, we started doing actual "operations" together. We would send scouts flying around looking for large spice fields while also checking the surrounding area for other players and potential threats.
Once we had assessed the risk, the rest of us would move in with the Carrier and Crawler and start harvesting. The excitement was unreal.
Of course, during our first proper spice crawl, we were attacked by a Harkonnen guild. We fought it out and managed to get away while losing very little.
By the end of that operation, we were ecstatic.
It was already pretty late in the evening, so we called it quits for the day, but none of us could wait to get back on and play again. The Deep Desert had actually made the game feel dangerous, unpredictable and exciting.
By this point, however, we were getting close to the end of the available content.
Most of us kept going anyway.
We geared ourselves up with max-level equipment and started going into Testing Stations. Quite often, we would find Harkonnen players hiding nearby, waiting for us to finish before ambushing us and trying to steal everything we had farmed.
Sometimes they succeeded.
We died, lost our farm, and had to deal with the consequences.
But instead of making us want to quit, it usually made us want to go straight back out there — both to try to recover our stuff and to fight the Harkonnen guild that had been ratting us.
For most of us, this was actually fun.
It felt appropriate for a game set in the Dune universe. Resources mattered. Territory mattered. Other players were a genuine threat. Losing something actually meant something, and succeeding felt rewarding because there had been some risk involved.
Unfortunately, after weeks of doing the same activities without any meaningful updates to the game, things started becoming repetitive.
A large part of the player base also started disappearing because there simply was not enough content or enough new things to do.
Gradually, fewer and fewer of my friends joined Discord to play Dune.
Those of us who remained were okay with that at first. We were waiting for new content and hoping that Funcom would eventually introduce a proper endgame that gave us more reasons to keep playing.
But after weeks without much new content, everyone from my original group had eventually left the game except for me and my best friend.
We still weren't ready to give up on it.
So, the two of us started new characters on PAX, which at the time was one of the most populated European servers.
We grinded our way all the way back into the Deep Desert, and on a populated server the place was crazy. There were players everywhere, guilds competing with each other, and once again there was that sense that something could actually happen while you were out there.
By this point, the Deep Desert had been divided roughly between PvE and PvP areas which I felt was alright, I guess.
It wasn't necessarily what I wanted, but there was still enough happening that we continued playing.
Then Funcom started making changes that, for me, completely killed the excitement of the game.
The endgame increasingly seemed to be redesigned around players who wanted to avoid PvP entirely, and the risk-versus-reward gameplay that had made the Deep Desert exciting started disappearing.
Ornithopters became almost useless for meaningful aerial combat.
Then rocket launchers were changed so they could lock on, which also made progression toward things like "The Ancient Way" feel almost pointless to us. We had spent time grinding toward equipment and strategies that suddenly no longer felt meaningful.
Most importantly, fighting over resources gradually stopped being a major part of the game.
And once that disappeared, a lot of the reasons for organizing a group disappeared with it.
-There was less reason to scout.
-Less reason to plan an operation.
-Less reason to worry about what another guild might do.
-Less reason to protect a crawler
-Less reason to coordinate with your friends.
What had once felt like a dangerous shared world gradually started feeling more like a farming simulator where you simply repeated the same activities with very little meaningful risk attached to them.
Both my friend and I eventually stopped playing.
Even then, I remained optimistic.
I genuinely believed Funcom would eventually find a balance between PvE and PvP and bring back some of the things that had made the Deep Desert so exciting in the first place.
But, at least for me, that never really happened.
Instead, the game seemed to move further and further toward repetitive grinding without giving us enough meaningful reasons for why we were grinding in the first place.
And that is probably the most frustrating part of all.
A very vocal part of the community wanted the danger removed. They wanted safer farming, less forced PvP, fewer consequences for entering the Deep Desert, and more ways to simply play without having to deal with any hostility.
Funcom gave them more and more of exactly that.
And from my perspective, they gutted the very systems that made the endgame interesting in order to do it.
The irony is that after all those changes, many of those players still stopped playing anyway.
Meanwhile, many players like us, who actually enjoyed the tension, the rivalries, the risk of losing resources, the faction warfare and the need to organize with other people, were left with a version of the game that had removed most of what kept us logging in.
This was a game that once had a group of grown men with families, careers and responsibilities sitting together on Discord almost every evening.
It had us planning spice operations.
It had us scouting ahead for enemy guilds.
It had us fighting Harkonnen players over resources.
It even had some of us waking up in the middle of the night after a storm because we were that excited about getting back into the Deep Desert.
And somehow, Funcom managed to turn that experience into a game that none of us wanted to log into anymore.
For me, Dune: Awakening wasn't ruined because there was too much PvP.
It was ruined because Funcom removed the danger, competition and risk that gave the grind a purpose in the first place.
Without that, what is left is basically a PvE grinding game, and let’s be completely honest: there are already plenty of games that do PvE progression and grinding far better than Dune Awakening.
What made Dune: Awakening special to me was never the grind itself. It was everything surrounding it: scouting, planning, rival guilds, fighting over resources, protecting your crawler, risking your gear and never quite knowing what was going to happen when you entered the Deep Desert.
Once most of that disappeared, so did my reason to play.
