With survival MMO Dune: Awakening on the brink of release, Funcom has detailed one of the central features of the endgame: the Landsraad. In Dune's fiction, the Landsraad is a council made up of the heads of the Great Houses: most notably House Atreides and House Harkonnen. In a new video you can see below, Funcom explains how the Landsraad's political system has been adapted for the game.
In Dune: Awakening there are 25 lesser Houses (think of them as mission-giving entities), and each week those houses will choose to support either House Atreides or House Harkonnen, the two bigshots vying for control of the desert. The winner of the majority of those 25 House votes takes control of the world—and all the servers that make up that world—for the following week.
Player guilds can spend the week completing missions and objectives for those 25 lesser houses to sway their votes to support either Atredies or Harkonnen. At the end of the week, either Atreides or Harkonnen will have a majority of the 25 Landsraad votes, and the leaders of the player guilds that contributed to the winning faction will then get to vote on a decree—a new law that will be enacted for one week. Got all that?
As for those laws players can vote for, wow… they are pretty darn OP.
According to a beta player on the Dune: Awakening Discord, for instance, one decree will reduce repair costs and refining times by 75% for the entire week for guilds supporting the winning faction. A 75% reduction in refining times? That's a huge buff if you're involved in large-scale production. Another decree lowers crafting costs by 25% for the week, another way to get your guild way ahead in production.
There are also decrees that will give one faction exclusive tools, weapons, or armor via a vendor only accessible by that faction. More decrees increase ranged and melee weapon damage by 33%. Another buffs XP gain by 50%.
Only one decree can be enacted at a time, but most of these laws feel majorly OP, giving the winning faction a massive advantage for an entire week. Do you want to engage in PvP with someone who is by default doing an extra 33% damage, or has access to faction-exclusive armor or weapons? How will your faction's production lines keep up when the other side is refining materials 75% faster than you?
Joel Bylos, Dune: Awakening's creative director, says there are "pretty good systems in place" to provide a balance between the factions so one isn't constantly dominating a server week after week, and there are also plans for a third major faction (the Fremen, I imagine) which "will also have a role in that balance."
There's one more decree that is incredibly chilling, called The Right of Salvage. If it's enacted, dying to PvP in the deep desert means instead of just losing some collected resources, all of your gear can be looted. I imagine if that decree is enacted, PvP in the deep desert is going to be incredibly tense that week.
As for how you win votes for your faction, there are different ways to convince the majority of the great houses to swing your way. The main method looks to be claiming and holding control points in areas of the deep desert, battling against other players in PvP. Win the territory, win the vote.
If you're not into PvP, you can still help your guild, and thus your faction, to secure votes. You can take on jobs to invade NPC bases and kill their inhabitants, such as a mission shown in the video where House Torvold requests you wipe out a certain amount of an NPC group called "sandflies." Another House requests a supply of groundcars, so you can win them over by gathering resources, putting together a production line, crafting enough vehicles to fill the order, then delivering them.
You can check out the Landsraad explainer video below. Dune: Awakening launches June 10, with head start of June 5 for those who preorder the Deluxe or Ultimate edition.
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