Due to the massive success of the recent Dune movies, it seemed like Funcom's multiplayer survival game, Dune: Awakening, was poised to be a guaranteed hit. Sure enough, when the game was launched on PC back in June of this year, it blew up in popularity among the broader gaming community. According to SteamDB, Dune: Awakening reached an all-time peak of nearly 190,000 concurrent players on Steam just five days after its release. The reviews for the game, meanwhile, were largely positive. Dune: Awakening's critical reception, in fact, was considerably higher compared to Funcom's previous multiplayer game, Conan Exiles.
Despite getting off to a great start, Dune: Awakening hasn't really been able to maintain the momentum it had at launch. The game's player base has declined significantly as of late, and recent reviews for it on Steam have been mostly mixed, with many players citing its lack of endgame content, among other things, as key issues. To combat these problems, Funcom has revealed a new roadmap for Dune: Awakening, which outlines all the content it plans to add to the game from now until June 2026.
Dune: Awakening's New Roadmap is Way More Sparse than It Should Be
A New DLC and Update for Dune: Awakening Are Being Released This Month
The content featured in Dune: Awakening's roadmap is divided into two categories: free updates and paid DLCs. Every few months, Funcom plans to release a major content update for the game, along with a DLC of some kind. The first batch of content mentioned in the roadmap, the Lost Harvest DLC and the Chapter 2 update, will both launch on September 9. According to Funcom, this DLC will not only feature a new vehicle and new building pieces, but it will also include a new Contract chain with unique locations and a handful of emotes. The Chapter 2 update, on the other hand, will introduce Dynamic Encounters to the game, along with new Deep Desert layouts and Social Hub Contracts.
September Aside, The Rest of the Dune: Awakening Roadmap is Surprisingly Vague
While the first part of this roadmap does contain a decent amount of information about Dune: Awakening's Lost Harvest DLC and the Chapter 2 update, the rest of it is considerably more vague. Instead of giving players a clear idea of what to expect from Dune: Awakening in the last three months of 2025, the roadmap immediately jumps to 2026, with no explanation for the abrupt time skip. To make matters worse, the content highlighted in the 2026 section of the roadmap is surprisingly insufficient, to the point that it isn't really worth getting excited over.
Sometime between January and March 2026, Funcom plans to launch the Chapter 3 update, which will include a revamped endgame for Dune: Awakening, as well as some other unspecified content. During that same time frame, the company will release some new cosmetics for the game as part of the Raiders of the Broken Lands paid DLC, as well. Shortly thereafter, Funcom intends to release another new update and DLC between April and June 2026. The contents of this DLC and update, however, are being kept entirely under wraps. The only two things that the roadmap reveals about this DLC are that it's called The Water Wars and that it's centered around a war between the Water Shipper families.
Funcom plans to port Dune: Awakening to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2026, and it intends to release a major expansion for the game, as well.
Funcom Has Major Plans for Dune: Awakening, in Both the Short-Term and the Long-Term
To be fair to Funcom, the company has gone into greater detail about some of the content it plans to add to the game in a post on Dune: Awakening's official website. There, Funcom notes that it wants to implement several features in the game in the short term to address fan feedback, such as improved player logging, a vehicle salvaging system, and offline notifications about crucial in-game events. Later in the year, meanwhile, the company also wants to start fixing Dune: Awakening's endgame by adding more Landsraad activities and giving the Deep Desert area of the game more depth. While this plan is certainly ambitious, only time will tell if Funcom will be able to implement these features in a timely manner.
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Open-World, Survival, MMO
