Achievement Get! Dune Awakening.

Welcome to Arrakis

From the outset I would like to say MINOR STORY SPOILER WARNINGS. There will be minimal reveals outside of what an average viewer of the gameplay content and trailers wouldn’t already know.

Now, let’s start. You’ve created your character, picked your background, and have started your journey through the sands of Arrakis. You’ve already got your first achievement, congratulations! The early achievement journey through Dune is pretty simple, as most achievements are tied to the progression of the game along with the overall story. Things like: Place a Sub-Fief Console (Stake Your Claim), complete any contract (Job’s Done!), construct a sandbike (Across the Sands), and so many more are essential steps to playing Dune Awakening. They are unavoidable unless you choose to stop playing.

For the most part, this is a seamless experience. Placing a fabricator, a small ore refinery, a fuel powered generator, a blood purifier, and a small chemical refinery (Basic Machinery), or Dew Reaping 50’000 ml of water (Water Shippers Hate Him) are natural extensions of your gameplay journey throughout the game. These are expected outcomes and thus, easy achievements. The nuance comes from how you choose to play the game and the order in which you obtain these achievements. One of my very first achievements was buying a cup of water (Pressures of Thirst); to me, this was an extremely simple and natural task: I was thirsty when entering Griffin Station, I bought water, I got an achievement. As it stands though, only 28.3% of players actually have this achievement. Likewise, after joining a guild with some friends, I immediately obtained the water harvesting achievement before the blood exsanguination one of the same amount given the tools they had for water harvesting and my lack of remembrance when killing NPCs and collecting their blood. Ultimately the path that you obtain these achievements might be different, however these were clearly made with progression in mind, assuming you continued to play the game. But what about story and exploration?

Hawks and Griffins

Once you’ve crafted your sandbike and crossed into the Vermillius Gap, you’ve officially left the early game of Dune Awakening. You’re tasked to head to the Anvil to learn more about what’s going on in the War of Assassins and what you can do to progress your character’s internal story. Once you reach the Anvil, you come face to face with two characters from opposite factions: The Atreides and Harkonnen. This is your first step into the larger world of Dune.

Now, if you’re reading up to this point, I’m going to assume you’ve either read at least the first book, watched at least the first movie, or have played up to this point in the game. Therefore, I don’t need to tell you about the Atreides and the Harkonnen, as you’ve likely already figured out for yourself which faction you would side with if given the chance (I chose Atreides). Your initial goal is to find out what happened to an Atreides spy and report back to either Anton Tolliver or Levenbrech Maxim Kazmir. Choosing either will grant you basic experience and some Solari and set you on your journey to choosing your faction. Your next follow-up quest will provide you with your first round of House Reputation towards the chosen faction.

This is where player divergence generally begins, though the only major achievement affected really is which capital city you travel to first. If you choose to side with the Atreides, you’re more likely to travel to Arakeen. And if you choose Harkonnen, you’ll likely travel to Harko Village. Choosing a faction does not lock you out of visiting the other capital city and obtaining its achievement. In fact, for a vast majority of the story you’ll be darting between these two cities regardless of your faction choices. All of this to really say: Your faction choice does not impact the outcome of achievements, as there are only three faction-related achievements: Join a faction, Reach rank 5 with any faction (House Operator), and eliminating 500 house troops of the opposing faction (Master Assassin). The middle achievement is completed through contracts and house-specific quests, while the latter can be done by killing house NPCs in different locations (generally Deep Desert testing stations or downed ships).

Ultimately, your faction choice doesn’t change much in the way of achievements, just potentially the time it takes to get the few that exist for the house. Your largest barriers to achievements, and likely what will be the biggest barrier to completion, is the grind.

The Assassin’s Handbook

I’d like to talk about the story achievements and how other gemplay achievements actively tie into the story in some way, whether directly or not. Your directive from the outset is pretty simple and often repeated: Find the Fremen, wake the Sleeper. Without spoiling what this means and the steps to get there, it is the primarly throughline for the entire story up to a certain point and your driver for completing the main quest, as well as your characters’ journey to doing other things.

For example, there are skill trees that you can choose abilities in to enhance your gameplay in a multitude of ways. The Trooper tree offers you different offensive options through primarily ranged weapons and traversal mechanics. The Swordmaster tree provides different melee-oriented offensive options, as well as enhancements to combat healing and stamina bonuses. The Mentat is also a ranged-focused tree though not through traditional weapons, but more tactical options, often through assassination and weakness analysis. The Bene Gesserit provides similar melee options through stronger melee attacks, however you also get options to abilities through the Voice, such as sprinting faster, blinking behind enemies, and more. One tree that is completely different from combat is the Planetologist tree. This one is more about exploration and resource gathering, improving ways of minerals and water, allowing for longer climbing and creating maps, and more efficient vehicles. The reason I break all of these trees down is because there are, of course, achievements related to each of these trees. Each tree has three story quest chains tied to mentors of each tree that you must complete to unlock the entirety of the tree. These quests tie in partly to the main story, as some quests cannot be completed until you have progressed far enough into the story.

Along with skill trees, there are specific items, vehicles, and buildings you obtain through story progression. The static compactor, Fremen deathstill, Thumpers, Hunter Seeker drones, and even the Litany Against Fear are all obtained either through story progression or skill tree progression, tied to the main story. The benefit of all of this is that you get to experience an incredibly detailed world with a story that suits it perfectly, weaving you through every area of the map, allowing you to constantly progress your resource collection and gameplay growth along with the story.

The Divided Messiah

If your prescience has kicked in, you’ll recognize that these headings are achievement names. This one, cook 100 meals with Muad’Dib, is arguably the most time-consuming one to exist and thus likely resembles the average player’s experience when trying to hunt achievements for this game. The premise for the achievement is quite simple, it’s only when you dive deeper in that you realize a large portion of your commitment is going to be repetition and annoyance after some time, unless you can actively tie in completion through regular progression.

The game contained so many “Do something X amount of times” achievements that are unfortunately either incredibly tedious or really boring to do. Eliminating 500 slavers (Slaver Slayer) becomes a mind-numbing grind of either trying to do it with gear that is appropriate to the time you are introduced to the slavers, or coming back and one-shotting everything but then doing it 499 more times. Sometimes you get the benefit of having Landsraad missions that allow you to gain progress towards house rewards by killing certain enemy types (the Landsraad is its own beast entirely that would require an entire post dedicated to it and thankfully it has no achievements related to it), but most of the time it is voluntary completion rather than natural progression. These types of achievements often kill the average completion viability as nobody wants to spend a large percentage of playtime actively not playing the game. Spamming the same ability 25 times on a 35 second cooldown where you are forced to commit skillpoints to after completing a 3 part questline is daunting to say the least. Other achievements such as mining 10’000 units of all resources with handheld tools is something an avid player might obtain, however the scaling in resource gathering caps out pretty low later on due to the weight of resources, making things more of a slog to move around with.