I’ve been playing with a group of 10 friends I’ve known for over a decade, i’ve now hit over 200 hours in this game together. As of today, I’ll officially have hit 220 hours (currently at 215.6). And I have to say, this game has been an incredible experience, but there are a few things I need to get off my chest.

First off: Thank you, Funcom. Your game is magnificent when you aren’t zooming in on the tiny details. I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun in a game. I’ve never dumped over 200 hours into something without hopping into another game in between sessions. I absolutely love the world you've built, and I can't get enough of it.

Hours 0-100: The experience was absolutely spectacular. The storyline, gameplay, and how everything intermingles is superb. I wouldn’t recommend changing a thing here. There’s a great variety of things to do—whether it's dodging sandworms in your buggy or advancing through enemy types (though, I do wish there were more). You’re constantly exploring new zones and stations, and it really felt like I was part of the world, learning to survive and thrive.

After 100 hours: The pace slows down significantly. You’re still doing quest lines, farming the same nodes day in and day out, and you’ve likely moved your base to the northern side of the map, where Shai-Hulud is a distant memory. You get the thopter, which is a major milestone, but at that point, the world starts to feel less vibrant. The thrill of exploration fades as you start focusing on your map marker and less on the terrain.

150-200+ hours: Now you and your friends are preparing to tackle the Deep Desert. But, this is where the experience starts to feel… rough. You can’t party up with more than 3 guild mates, and you can’t even see your guild mates on the compass. You try to work around it, but the auto-targeting system kicks in, causing your character to constantly target teammates instead of enemies. It’s a frustrating system that makes combat more of a hassle than it needs to be.

Guild System:
The guild system accommodates up to 32 players, but everything about it seems to work against effective teamwork. There are no guild markers on the compass, no nameplates, and no swatch customization—so anyone can blend into your group at any time. You can’t even identify who’s who without constantly asking, “Who is this I’m looking at?”

Worse still, there’s no in-game guild recruitment page or system for players to browse and apply to guilds. If you want to grow your guild, you’re stuck relying on third-party Discords or random global chat messages. For a game that leans so heavily into guild play and coordination, not having a built-in recruitment tool is a huge oversight.

I’m a fan of friendly fire—it has its place. But what doesn’t belong is the auto-targeting of your own guild mates. It’s hard to “git gud” when your character is magnetically drawn to hitting teammates instead of enemies. At the very least, this needs a toggle. And please—for the love of the game—give us compass markers so we can at least quickly locate our allies without needing to scan every figure on the horizon.

Deep Desert & June 26 Patch:
I was excited about the PvE expansion in the Deep Desert, hoping it would make the PvE experience feel more rewarding. But the changes feel rushed. The patch notes suggested the update wouldn’t come for at least 1-2 weeks, yet it’s pushed out live within 24 hours. The lack of pre-leveled characters for testing also feels like a missed opportunity. If you want us to test, give us the resources to do so.

PvE/PvP Thoughts:
The southern half of the map being dedicated to PvE feels off. While I understand the need for T6 mats, half the map being PvE doesn’t seem right. I scouted the southern side and found hardly any resources worth gathering, which is frustrating. Why push this update now without adjusting the current node layouts?

PvP:
The combat system is where things feel the most broken. The lack of guild markers and the painful targeting system in combat make the PvP experience feel disjointed. Aerial combat is still fun, but I can’t help but feel like the dev team is missing the mark with some of these changes.

I’ll keep playing, but after today’s patch, my motivation has taken a dip. I hope the July update will bring some of these much-needed changes. Thanks for reading!

Convinced my friend to prepurchase for Beta weekend, expecting we'd get a day of fun before realizing we're too old to invest time in an MMO. With Steam's refund policy, it felt like a no-risk scenario. Little did I know we'd talk about this game frequently over the following month of eager anticipation, and it would go on to take over our entire gaming lives.

MMO? More like a classic survival base-building open world single player adventure with a little room for co-op. If you like Dune, even better. The game does a fantastic job of immersing you in the world of Arrakis, using common survival mechanics to make you respect the world around you. Staying out of the sun, draining NPC blood, keeping your base’s power supply topped up...wait, are we playing V Rising or Dune?

The open world is dauntingly expansive. Each journey, before you get an ornithopter, requires careful planning. Even with plenty of thought, Shai-Hulud never ceases to humble...

After numerous meetings with the Maker that forced me to get extremely comfortable with the early game grind into iron age, I finally started to make some progress into steel. I set up an outpost across the quicksand gap and got a little too comfortable with the route. My bike got stuck in quicksand, the worm was seconds from arrival, I abandoned my bike and barely made it to the cliffside. That started a session that made me feel like a true Fremen.

I made it out of the quicksand, but my primary weapons were almost broken. No bike. Shield and suspensor belt at half durability. I was stuck on the Northern side of the gap with a brand new base and nothing but ore and a refiner.

I spent the next two hours basically starting from scratch, but in a much more demanding zone where all my midgame gear eventually broke. With a junk knife, no shield and back to drinking dew off leaves, I was forced to master combat against shielded enemies who could kill me in two hits, but would only fall to 5+ stabs of my tier 1 shank.

A few hours later, my friend logged on. At first I begged him to come pick me up and take me home. But then I realized I was no longer the off-worlder I had started as. I stripped down to my underwear, deposited what little I had at my new base and decided I'd either make it back alone or give myself to the desert. Each new gap around drum-sand had my heart racing, but a combination of bindu-sprint and trooper ziplines got me back to the comforts of early Haga Basin.

Arrived at my friend's doorstep naked, dehydrated and with barely a quarter bar of health...but alive.

When I’m humbled by Shai-Hulud again, I won’t fear. Fear is the mind killer. And now I’m a badass Fremen who doesn’t need no fear.

8/10, 9 if you like grinding. Pretty janky, but I typically find janky glitches charming. Devs seems responsive to player feedback and have already improved the late game forced PVP. If I ever get there, I'll stick to the PVE survival grind.

Just make PvE servers and all-PvP servers, you're trying to mix two playerbases where half don't want to interact with the other, and the other half want to forcibly interact with the first half to avoid having to actually interact with themselves (I wouldn't want to interact with them either tbf). It seems like the devs knew a PvP game would sell poorly, so they setup an elaborate rugpull where you get 85% of the way through the resource tree making you feel like you need to go into an empty, boring flatland in order to see the game through. Unlike 80% of the playerbase I actually checked out the deep desert and it was before the changes, and when I got there the entire chat was just whiny manchildren that sit there all day stroking themselves and accusing each other of being unemployed (they all are).
You put me into a position to where I actually need to sit in the PvP area for longer because nobody just gets a kill and moves on. They either wipe your ornithopter that takes ~3 hours just to process the raw ore for, or if they happen to catch you on open sand they summon a sandworm that wipes out everything you built and have on you while watching like creepy psychopaths that pulled the wings off of a butterfly to feed it to a snake. These are not people that need to be catered to. I never once died in the deep desert before the changes, but I also had to play like a complete coward because you either can have missiles on your thopter or storage racks. I had to be forced to choose whether I could defend myself (because your player build doesn't matter, everything is just thopter combat) or carry more than 3 nodes worth of ore (because the inventory amount is pitiful and there's zero upgrades for it). After the changes I managed to find a whopping 4 nodes in the PvE area, so what's the point? The changes feel passive-aggressive and pointless.
The first part of the game was a lot of fun, and full of tension on its own without having to worry about being some jobless latent serial killer's pet torture project for the hour, but now my options are to wander a boring flat plain for hours on end, or get pushed into a tinier area with the same amount of weirdos. This idea that people are supposed to spend every waking minute of their free time in a video game is sad and dystopian, plenty of people are happy with buying a game, seeing the content, and then moving on, and the ones that aren't are a sad vocal minority. Nobody seems happy anywhere, so I'll just not play the game and recommend that anyone who doesn't want some forevergame substitute job do the same.