Dune Awakening is coming to consoles at long last, but for some reason, it will not have crossplay

Dune Awakening is coming to consoles at long last, and is getting a dedicated single-player mode. Unfortunately, there’ll be no crossplay between most platforms.

Announced during last night’s Sony State of Play livestream, the survival MMO was presented to PlayStation fans, a group who previously had no way to play the faithful Dune game. Elaborated on in a dedicated post on the official Dune Awakening website, the game will be launching on both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on the 22nd September.

In addition, the 22nd of September will offer players the single player mode across all platforms. This, according to the post, was one of the most demanded features from players.

These console versions will contain all the PC updates released up until now, and will be fully aligned with the original version of the game. However, the blog post also drops a curious byte of information.

“Note: the game will not feature cross-play between different console platforms nor PC and consoles, except for cross-play between Xbox and Windows PC Store.” This has been received with some disappointment from the Dune Awakening community. North117 described this on the Dune Awakening Reddit as: “One of the worst decisions they’ve made so far”. User Atomic Hyena added their own take, noting: “I got so excited thinking my non-PC friends could play with me.”

Eurogamer has contacted Funcom to find out why this restriction is in place. It’s worth noting that Conan Exiles, the prior big hit from the developer, also didn’t allow crossplay, for the most part.

Still, it’s not all bad news. That aforementioned single player mode will allow players to experience the MMO survival game without those MMO bits. All the NPCs will still be present, but the world is entirely your own. As for the PvP Deep Desert endgame area, it will no longer reset each week and your buildings will not be wiped out either. In addition, the Landsraad system will remain, but will simulate other players’ contributions to keep things interesting.

Single player characters will be locked to single player instances, so you won’t be able to hop over to the online version of the game. Alongside all of this, the first book (major story arc) will conclude on the 22nd September, so console players will be able to experience the full narrative from start to finish. That is, until more story updates come out.

It’s a bold move from Funcom. Dune Awakening proved exceptionally popular when it was released, but sadly lost the majority of its PC playerbase over time. Since then, multiple major changes have been made to improve the experience, including a softening to the PvP experience which was pushing many away from Dune: Awakening‘s endgame. Here’s hoping this reinvigorates the game.