Dune: Awakening is getting a single-player mode and more story content

In quite a surprise, the MMO Dune: Awakening is getting a single-player mode for those who don't want to deal with other people while exploring the desert.

That's…actually pretty sweet. It's a genuinely interesting game, but it really does take a lot of time due to the MMO mechanics so I'm really keen to see how they tweak everything if you're playing it completely solo. Exciting. Not only will it be getting a single-player mode but they're also adding more to the story that they said will finish up "Book One" and there will be more on the way too.

Single-player is easily one of the most requested features. With the September release, you can finally experience the entire game in single-player mode, across all platforms, and play it entirely at your own pace.

When you first start the game, you will choose between single-player and multiplayer. Single-player offers three preset difficulty levels for the survival experience, or full manual customization of individual settings. Want faster experience gain, easier enemies, or quicker harvesting? All of that is adjustable.

Single-player plays very similarly to multiplayer, with a few key differences:

• All the NPCs are there, but no other players.
• The Deep Desert is fully available with all its content and challenges, but the map never resets and your buildings are never wiped. The Coriolis Storm remains as a weather event but is less destructive.
• The Landsraad endgame simulates other players engaging with the faction conflict, keeping it competitive and engaging.

Sadly, with the console release, the online part will not feature cross-play which is quite the downer. That would have been an excellent boost for it.

They also announced some big changes coming to game customization, with a lot more options:

While official servers always use default settings, at PC launch, even private servers offered only a few settings that could be tweaked.

All that is changing, and in a big way. For single-player, self-hosted servers, and rented private servers, a much wider range of settings can be customized. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Enable or disable sandstorms
• Security zones (for example, make Hagga Basin fully PvP or fully PvE)
• Resource harvesting rate multipliers
• Experience points rate multipliers
• Base building piece limits
• Item durability settings
• Base decay rate
• Sandworm auto-spawn
• Coriolis storm auto-spawn
• Adjust what drops on death
• Increase max number of land claims

All settings are available in single-player and on self-hosted servers. For rented private servers, availability depends on each server provider. This update is already live on PC for self-hosted and rented private servers.

The online play still uses BattlEye anti-cheat which is enabled for Linux / SteamOS like quite a few games are but plenty of others still block Linux.

“For those who want to take a deeper dive on Arrakis, Dune: Awakening offers the ultimate opportunity to step into the books and movies and experience one of science fiction’s most iconic worlds up close,” said Creative Director Joel Bylos. “For fans of the movies, we also have tie-in content lined up this year.”