Dune: Awakening is out now and works well on Linux Desktop but rough on Steam Deck

Dune: Awakening from Funcom has officially arrived, and thankfully it does work rather nicely on Desktop Linux. Disclosure: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.

How does Dune: Awakening connect to the Dune books and films? It's the same world, but an alternate timeline where Paul Atreides was never born. Here Lady Jessica had a daughter, which pushed things in a different direction. Duke Leto Atreides survived the attempt on his life and is now locked in a conflict with the Harkonnen over Arrakis and its precious spice.

The good news, as I shared previously, is that BattlEye anti-cheat is enabled for Linux platforms and so there's no issues playing it. Side-note: check out our anti-cheat compatibility page. The game does have a launcher too, which is for once not an annoyance. It loads just fine and I haven't had any problems with that side of it.

Since this is an absolutely massive game, please do not consider this an attempt at any kind of formal review. It's pretty close to impossible to do that for something this big, which will change often since it's an MMO.

Desktop Linux / General

Only one Linux-specific problem I've encountered, is that it initially gave a slow hard drive warning, but I've never seen it again since the first time and it hasn't been a problem. I've seen this a few times with Windows games on Proton but it's whatever they use to detect your drive not working well with Proton. Other than that, using the current stable Proton 9.0-4 the game really has been running great during Advanced Access.

Start off with character customization, there's a good amount that you can do here. With skin tones, hair styles, vitiligo, freckles, neck size, eyebrows and more you can make some pretty interesting looking people. After actually making your character, you'll then move onto some background details like where you were born to get a special emote and your initial skillset sorted.

Playing this, at least in the early hours, firmly reminded me of the times spent running around in Rust. The initial loop is somewhat similar, especially when you randomly come across a little house from someone and they come running out at you. That, and your bases needing an upkeep. It's a survival game at its heart with a whole lot of MMO features. So you'll be engaging in various events but you'll also need to keep an eye on your character's needs like dehydration. Unlike Rust though, this is a far more forgiving game (for the most part) and I've not had a problem running solo in it.

I'm also feeling a little bit of Breath of the Wild for the climbing. And even a bit Assassin's Creed for the map system. The way you need to survey to actually reveal areas of the map, to then go to new locations for intel and repeat. There's a lot of different gameplay features that have been mashed together here. I do appreciate the survey system is not some static location though. You craft survey probes and fire them up into the sky, wherever you can get high enough.

The sun is definitely not your friend here. It's Dune, of course it isn't. Staying out of the sun is a necessity since it will burn you to a crisp if you stay out too long. Something the tutorial, which is surprisingly good as an MMO walk-through, keeps drilling into you. Add into that the massive Sandworms, you're never a few feet away from immediate danger. I really like it though, this constant sense of urgency you get in Dune: Awakening really keeps you on your toes — but, not in a punishing way, it's more about keeping you focused on it.

Sandworms are an absolute menace in this. It's such a unique feeling threat for an online game. You need to cross over the dunes often, and seeing the middle of your screen show the vibration UI meter wobbling, and then you hear the rumbling - it can end up as a real "oh shit" moment. Doubly so, because it's a really brutal death too. Not just because you're being gobbled up by a massive freaking worm, but you'll lose everything. You're going to see a lot of players running around in their underwear in this one I think. Death by normal PvE or PvP at least won't get you to lose everything but you'll lose some resources.

Getting swallowed by a worm can really set you back a long time too, especially if you were carrying some essentials and don't have a good respawn set up. One thing to help with that though: respawn beacons. You can craft them and place them down near enough anywhere. It's like mashing a quick-save button in a horror game, just make sure you have a few ready. I cannot stress enough how setting up a good respawn point is. I messed up at one point, and it set me back a good while. Note: your base is not an automatic respawn point, you need to manually activate it. If you forget, you might be screwed and have a long way to travel. I feel they should tweak this though, that if you only have one it should automatically be a spawn point.

The first time you get swallowed by a worm, it's not as punishing, as you can accept a gift of a speeder (or not - your choice). But that's it. Everything else is still just gone. Don't take anything out with you that you're not willing to lose. I'll admit I shed a little tear the first time it happened. It was quite an event, heart-pumping frightening and maddening at the same time. At least I was still only about 11 hours in, so it didn't reset me too much, but still super frustrating.

A little tip for you: have a chest full of backup equipment. A basic set of weapons, tools and clothing. Always keep it stocked. That will make the experience far less destroying when it happens. And it will happen.

It's not just the giant worms you have to worry about though…

You also have the weather to face. Sandstorms are a regular occurrence requiring you to seek urgent shelter. There's varying levels of shelter too from partial to water-tight. So you'll need either a good base, a special shield, or just — something that can shield you from the storm. Heck, I've found a few times a tiny little gap in a rock would do just enough to protect me while it flows past.

Each week on Tuesday morning (UTC) there's also a Coriolis Storm, the most intense Sandstorm, which will refresh the Deep Desert with a new generated map. The servers go down for this, which is usually about 2 hours long. This is part of how the developers at Funcom plan to keep players interested, since each week there will be new stuff to explore. Which thankfully means all your hard work building up in the PvE areas is not wiped.

Once you get your first Sandbike, the game really opens up quite a lot. Until that point, you're still in the tutorial. The initial area is quite big and open, but there's not exactly a whole lot there. Once you get into the Vermillious Gap up North, things get bigger and far more dangerous too.

Adding to the existing dangers you'll also deal with Drumsand, which makes extra noise when you cross it and those worms are ready and waiting to pounce. Thankfully with the map scanning system, you can just send up a probe and reveal the area and see where all the Drumsand is to try and avoid it. Easier said than done though. You'll turn into a Rockhopper soon enough when you starting hearing worms coming.

Dune: Awakening has quite an interesting and easy to use building system, which was nice to play around with. You start off building a Sub-Fief Console, which allows you to claim an area of land. You can do this almost anywhere. You can instantly build, but you can also set down blueprints to actually plan your base builds giving you quite a lot of freedom, as long as you're within your claimed area.

Don't get too attached to your first base though, as you progress you actually have to completely abandon it as part of the quest-line. That felt a little rough to me, as I put more effort than I should have into the first base and couldn't be arsed with all the backtracking to pick up some stuff left in there. Oh well.

Annoyances with being forced to abandon a base aside, it does make sense. Upkeep is needed with fuel cells to power your base shield, this ticks down all the time and at the start spreading you across more than one would be silly.

You know what makes exploring it great though? The different types of belts you can get. Some can pretty much entirely stop fall damage, others can allow you to float upwards at speed. They all use power though, so you need to have a battery equipped which will drain. All your items can get damaged too, so you'll need to sort out your repair station. There's so many things to keep thinking on when you're exploring and what equipment to take with you.

Not just that, the vehicle system is pretty great too. You can have multiple types of vehicles and easily store them using a device you carry with you, to be able to spawn them in whenever you need. So while the world is big and takes quite some time to cross it, once you get far enough in it's not that big of an issue…unless you're worm food.

There's a definite repeat grind to the game though, it really does take forever at times to do even the simplest thing. That's the way it's designed though, it's an MMO and they need you to keep playing. Especially with the water system, it's not just about quenching your thirst. It's also needed for construction materials too, so you're balancing resources often. It does get easier as you go through the research though. You start off sucking a little water from plants, and eventually you'll be able to carry around containers full of water - but it takes a while and water goes fast.

They do need to tweak NPC spawning though, as I've had hostile NPCs spawn directly inside my base. Perhaps that might be the location I picked, but even so, it just shouldn't happen. It's my base with a powered shield, they need to go away. Just look at how brazen they are, standing in my doorway, acting is if they own the place. Excuse me NPC, that is my humble abode, would you mind dying so I can get in?

Some accidental genius with my base placement though. With a steady stream of NPCs, I can harvest their blood for water on a regular basis. So actually if the developers could not fix the spawning and increase it a little, I'll be swimming in er — purified blood water.

Nice. Don't mind if I do.

Now, let's talk about the combat. I've only done a small amount of PvP, but quite a lot of PvE, mostly because I still have so much yet to explore to see more of the PvP. My first PvP encounter went about what I expected while exploring a crashed ship. I saw someone run past, got scared and asked them not to shoot. I walked closer and then they began firing at me, after I got closer again they pulled out their sword hit me a few times and eventually they just ran away.

Until you see more types of enemies, the PvE falls a little flat though but eventually gets a bit more interesting. When you're trying to dodge multiple different types ranged weapons, grenades and people coming running at you with knives it can get quite frantic.

The enemy AI is often a bit overly dumb though. I've lost count of the amount of times I've been standing directly in front of an enemy, and they just don't react at all until I shove a sword into their chest.

What makes the melee a bit more fun is the shield system. You and enemies can equip a personal shield, which needs to be broken with a power-attack. Shielded enemies can really make things quite difficult when you get surrounded. It's a fun system.

And since it's an MMO, what good is it without a friendly neighbour?

Thanks, DoubleFreedom, you're a real one. You saved me from the sands.

Performance

The Desktop Linux testing was done on Kubuntu 25.04: AMD Ryzen 5800x, Radeon 6800 XT and 2560x1440. With most settings either on High or Ultra, with XeSS upscaling on Ultra Quality and FSR Frame Generation turned on.

Performance is perhaps my biggest surprise here. We have a big-branded MMO that actually works rather well at release. I am shocked. There's areas that will bring the performance down, but I've never seen it dip to a level where I thought it wasn't acceptable. Funcom did quite good here.

So far the only place I've seen it dip below 60FPS was during the fourth trial. But it was still above 50FPS. Overall, the game has been mostly over 90FPS.

The worst performing part of the game? Weirdly, the map. When you zoom in the performance goes right down and it does feel sluggish there. Not exactly a big deal but worth noting. One thing that is annoying, is the cursor seems off position when zoomed in, making placing a marker a bit of a nuisance but it's fine when zoomed out.

Stable too. In many multi-hour sessions, not even a single crash. Actually amazed at that. Which is sad to say, but that's the industry, too many games are rushed out by the people at the top but it seems not in this case.

Steam Deck

I was really curious to see how it would go on Steam Deck here, since the original benchmark I covered showed a fair amount of promise. For the install, luckily you're fine there as it's a lot smaller than I was expecting at only 41.81GB on disk so it can easily fit alongside your other games. My testing was on the Steam Deck LCD, SteamOS 3.7.8 Stable.

One thing you'll want to do right away is flick on the experimental "Low End Laptop Mode". This reduces the visual quality quite a bit, but does allow the game to be playable to a certain degree. Even flicking about all other settings to their lowest, the performance is still just all over the place. Especially so when you get further in and more is happening, it will still drop below 30FPS repeatedly.

I got swallowed by a worm testing this on Steam Deck for you, I hope you're happy. The things I do for you, my dear readers…

You're also going to get barely even 1 single hour on battery on the Steam Deck LCD. Probably about 50 minutes tops.

If the Steam Deck is your only way to play, it's playable, but not exactly a good experience. Doing some light casual exploring and resource gathering is fine, but anything more intense I wouldn't exactly recommend on Steam Deck.

Other SteamOS systems and Desktop Linux it will be fine, providing your system has the specs for it. But you're not really going to enjoy it on Deck. I mentioned earlier how the map is the biggest performance problem even on Desktop, and that issue is only amplified on Steam Deck with it dropping really low and makes it a nuisance to use.

While it notes it has Steam Cloud, you're going to want to ensure you link up your Steam and Dune accounts from the main menu, otherwise it won't detect your existing characters. It's easy enough to do, it's just signing in with Steam and then entering an email. It's a proper MMO, so that type of experience is to be expected.

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With Advanced Access over, hopefully any server problems have been sorted too, which did cause the game to drop quite quickly into Mixed user reviews. However, Funcom had a rapid turnaround on that and at time of writing it has hit Very Positive. That's at least one upside for this pay-up for Advanced Access model, the people paying extra get to enjoy all the initial issues. And the developers get to solve them before everyone else joins in.

There's plenty of small bugs and quirks, as expected for a big new release but don't let that put you off.

I've repeatedly said to myself, "I'll just play it for a quick hour to do a little more", which seems to turn into 4-5 hours every time. I completely lose track of life whenever I load it up. I was supposed to be making more preparations for Steam Next Fest yesterday and ended up playing well over 6 hours without a break just because I was so entirely sucked into it. Woops.

While the game is an MMO, it is doing a pay-once model. There's no ongoing subscription fees and no micro-transactions. But there will be DLC expansions releasing Q4 2025, Q1 2026 and Q2 2026 included in a Season Pass. Funcom said they plan continuous free updates to the game too.

As far as MMOs and survival games go, this is the most fun with them I've had in years. It's fantastic that such a huge release comes working on Linux out of the box. I couldn't be happier. Surviving the unforgiving desert has never felt so good. I've really thoroughly enjoyed the exploration, unlocking new research and skills and exploring some more. I have a lot of the game still left to cover since it's an MMO though, I'm only really scratching the surface here.

You can also follow the game on Bluesky.