At long last, the transfer of power is complete. Dune: Awakening, Funcom's ambitious survival MMO based on the classic sci-fi novel, has completed is pivot away from massive multiplayer, and can now be played fully offline.
The offline function arrived in an otherwise unremarkable patch that mainly fixes specific bugs and technical issues. "It's now possible to play the game in single-player mode without requiring an internet connection at any point, including creating and deleting single-player characters.," Funcom revealed in a Steam post.
Dune: Awakening has been gradually drifting away from being a purely multiplayer experience for some time. In April, Funcom made its PvP element, like the Deep Desert and shipwreck exploration, fully optional. A fully fledged single-player mode arrived in September, including a dramatic rework of several major endgame systems—like its dynamic political "Landsraad" system' to make them work in solo play. At that point, single-player still required an Internet connection. Now though, that's no longer the case.
To be clear, Dune: Awakening can still be played with all its multiplayer and PvP trappings, now including a "Go Online" button for exactly that purpose. Nonetheless, it's been a fascinating shift in direction, one that, alongside games like Marathon, embodies a broader apparent trend away from large-scale. competitive multiplayer experiences toward smaller, cooperative communities. Whether with friends or alone, players increasingly want to be able to live in their own worlds, unbothered by the wider, more tumultuous encounters of the open Internet.
Whether this is a positive shift is up for debate—encounters with strangers on the Internet can provide highs as well as lows—but it's certainly an interesting one. Either way, offline mode isn't the end of Dune: Awakening's journey. A new expansion is coming in December, one that lets players explore Arrakis' frozen poles in a radically different scenario from the base game. Funcom appears to be in it for the long term with Awakening too, having recently pivoted to focusing purely on support for it and its other multiplayer survival game Conan: Exiles.
