Former survival MMO Dune: Awakening can now be played 'without requiring an Internet connection at any point' as its much requested offline mode arrives

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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 not possible to play the game in single-player mode without requiring an Internet connection at any point," Funcom revealed in a Steam post. This includes "creating and deleting single-player characters."

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.

Dune: Awakening - Official Console and Single-Player Launch Trailer - YouTube

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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.

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Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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