I've been messing around in Dune Awakening's endgame for a month now, and . . . to be honest . . . I can see why people cycle out, especially if they're on a more casual server like we are. That's because once you get to endgame, you really only have the grind and game chores to look forward to each week . . . or just making your own fun. When you make your own fun, it's things like our "FREE MAZE" that occupy your day.
Dylan loves the base building in Dune and makes the most magnificent looking palaces. His temple / sand buggy garage / carrier thopter storage base is a thing of legends. His small base ain't no joke either. He's modified it several times to get both a large spice and a large ore refinery to work there.
When we ran into trouble using solidos out in the Deep Desert, it was Dylan that came up with the upside-down pyramid structure that let us reliably copy our base each week.
As for me, I'm a goofy ex-game designer. My builds are all over the place, but I did come up with a maze at my base that led to a container holding all of my in-game gold. At each dead end, there was a chest full of random junk and in the middle of the maze, there's a trap that would dump you out to provide a little challenge.
I had Dylan run through it and he solved it pretty easily, which was fine -- never was meant to be hard, just something to build. After he went through it he said, "What about building a multi-level maze?" I admit, I was thinking the same direction. That's when our FREE MAZE was born.
The Free Maze is a structure on top of a hanging ledge that entices players in with the words "FREE MAZE" in old school billboard letter fashion. The maze features four downward levels of mazes.
The first level is just your basic maze. At first, I had included half-ramps to make it more interesting, but we had an online acquaintance of ours getting stuck because he was dashing and ducking everywhere. We nixed the ramps.
The second level uses the new Duneman set of furniture and has you jumping up over barriers and ducking down angled walls while getting your view blocked a bit by columns.
The third level is a set that features a lot of doorways and Harkonnen dividers. The hardest part of set up here is making sure all the doorways are set to public access. They're only meant to confuse and distract you, not completely block you.
The fourth level was originally meant to be full of pit traps, but as it turns out, the pit traps could easily serve as short cuts into the bottom of the maze and didn't have any real danger. Instead, we made it one that's kind of hard to maneuver around in with half walls you have to duck or jump over.
We did leave one pit though. It was the only one that was dangerous enough to keep. (Tipa found it and fell all the way down to the sands below. SUCCESS!)
At the end of the fourth level, we had originally constructed a fifth level that was an upward obstacle course, but ultimately it was a little confusing, so we just put our reward chest at the end inside the fifth level and changed the upward obstacle to be our behind-the-scenes homebase instead.
If you managed to make it to the end chest, we stuffed it with 10k gold, some spice, and a bunch of other little goodies. As for the maze itself, ultimately it takes about an hour to an hour and a half to rebuild this maze the way Dune is currently set up to handle solido blueprints, and that makes it a big downer for breaking out each week in the Deep Desert.
Just to be sure you understand, each week the Deep Desert resets and any base you built out there is erased. Everything in the Deep Desert is erased and then the next week you play, all the caves and instances and treasures are located in different areas within the sands.
This corresponds with the Lansraad event where you go about earning favor for each house in the Dune Universe by either holding control points out in the Deep Desert or by doing small tasks for them during the week, like killing scavengers in the noobie-area or mass producing suspensor belts and turning them in for credit "in the name of the Red Duke."
Ultimately it leads to a lot of "chores" you have to do each week to play the end game, which can seem extremely tedious. Sure, the rewards are pretty fantastic . . . but they're also so fantastic that if you 100 percent them in a week, you're going to be sitting pretty well geared, fat with gold, and happy.
Since I've been on government shutdown, I've been able to be on a daily quest to capture control points with our allied guilds on the Atreides side of house. On our server cluster, the Harkonens really aren't much of a threat. We dominate, and we dominate hard.
Every day at 11:00 MST, everyone logs on, gets in a party, and claims control points together as a group. It is hands down the best way to claim your Lansraad rewards. Most control points on our server aren't even contested that much. If you miss the party for control points, you're out of luck and will have to rely on doing the chore associated with the house.
When I'm not on Government Shutdown, I'll be at work. There's no way I can do those control points, so it's going to be chore city for me (and hopefully soon).
So that's it . . . rebuilding bases every week, running Lansraad chores, collecting spice, collecting ore, processing spice, processing ore, flying over a vast desert in less than thrilling game play . . . it's all a bit tedious after a while, and that's why (like I said back at the top of the post) I can see why people cycle out of this game, which is something they've struggled with.
Chapter three will apparently bring updates to the game that will amp the fun on the end game, but you won't see that happen until sometime early 2026. I'm afraid we'll have likely cycled out of the game by that time unless we start over on an actual public server where griefing and slowdowns are to be expected as you participate in the Deep Desert.
For now I'm just happy Dylan and I have had the chance to build our FREE MAZE and share it with the people of our server cluster. They're some fun people, and I've had a good time capturing control points with them the past few weeks. I guess it really is friendship that brings us back.
If I was to make a couple suggestions:
- Make the solido able to be built in one click. Just give me a chest that asks for multiple raw building materials needed to construct it, and when I fill up the chest, it auto builds my creation. (Reference the game Creativerse)
- Make a way to UPS (mail) goods from the Deep Desert to my home base in Hagga. As it is now, you'll make multiple trips back and forth through an overland map. I'd prefer a vendor that would allow me to pay for shipping back to my home base. I'll pay a price to do that. It'd be worth it.
Those two small changes would be pretty fantastic alone. Dylan and I have been making a small list of other changes we'd love to see, but those two would help make things feel much less of a chore. (I know, I know, first world videogame problems, but I had to mention it on the off chance a dev might drop by someday.)
Happy Dueling!
