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Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag Try a single issue or save on a subscription Issues delivered straight to your door or device From£35.99View PC Gaming Show Computex 2025 TES4: Oblivion Elden Ring: Nightreign Recommended reading Dune Awakening's latest trailer offers a glimpse of its massive coriolis storms, which reshape swathes of the map each week for 'infinite exploration' Here's what happens to your base in Dune: Awakening if you take a long break from Arrakis Dune: Awakening: Everything we know about Funcom's survival MMO 'Don't leave trash on Arrakis'—Dune: Awakening creative director implores players to 'clean up your old bases' Survival & Crafting After 25 hours of the Dune: Awakening beta, I'm sold on it as a survival game but still a bit iffy on the MMO parts Survival & Crafting Dune: Awakening promises us a breath of fresh air, skipping early access for a full launch with no monthly subscription in May Dune: Awakening confirms air-to-air combat in ornithopters Survival & Crafting Dune: Awakening Dune: Awakening's player guilds will be able to pass some pretty OP server-wide laws—including one that means you'll lose everything when defeated in deep desert PvP Christopher Livingston 29 May 2025 Get ready for players to make big changes to the world of Dune: Awakening. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Funcom) With survival MMO Dune: Awakening on the brink of release, Funcom has detailed one of the central features of the endgame: the Landsraad. In Dune's fiction, the Landsraad is a council made up of the heads of the Great Houses: most notably House Atreides and House Harkonnen. In a new video you can see below, Funcom explains how the Landsraad's political system has been adapted for the game. In Dune: Awakening there are 25 lesser Houses (think of them as mission-giving entities), and each week those houses will choose to support either House Atreides or House Harkonnen, the two bigshots vying for control of the desert. The winner of the majority of those 25 House votes takes control of the world—and all the servers that make up that world—for the following week. Player guilds can spend the week completing missions and objectives for those 25 lesser houses to sway their votes to support either Atredies or Harkonnen. At the end of the week, either Atreides or Harkonnen will have a majority of the 25 Landsraad votes, and the leaders of the player guilds that contributed to the winning faction will then get to vote on a decree—a new law that will be enacted for one week. Got all that? You may like Dune Awakening's latest trailer offers a glimpse of its massive coriolis storms, which reshape swathes of the map each week for 'infinite exploration' Here's what happens to your base in Dune: Awakening if you take a long break from Arrakis Dune: Awakening: Everything we know about Funcom's survival MMO As for those laws players can vote for, wow… they are pretty darn OP. According to a beta player on the Dune: Awakening Discord, for instance, one decree will reduce repair costs and refining times by 75% for the entire week for guilds supporting the winning faction. A 75% reduction in refining times? That's a huge buff if you're involved in large-scale production. Another decree lowers crafting costs by 25% for the week, another way to get your guild way ahead in production. There are also decrees that will give one faction exclusive tools, weapons, or armor via a vendor only accessible by that faction. More decrees increase ranged and melee weapon damage by 33%. Another buffs XP gain by 50%. Only one decree can be enacted at a time, but most of these laws feel majorly OP, giving the winning faction a massive advantage for an entire week. Do you want to engage in PvP with someone who is by default doing an extra 33% damage, or has access to faction-exclusive armor or weapons? How will your faction's production lines keep up when the other side is refining materials 75% faster than you? The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Joel Bylos, Dune: Awakening's creative director, says there are "pretty good systems in place" to provide a balance between the factions so one isn't constantly dominating a server week after week, and there are also plans for a third major faction (the Fremen, I imagine) which "will also have a role in that balance." There's one more decree that is incredibly chilling, called The Right of Salvage. If it's enacted, dying to PvP in the deep desert means instead of just losing some collected resources, all of your gear can be looted. I imagine if that decree is enacted, PvP in the deep desert is going to be incredibly tense that week. As for how you win votes for your faction, there are different ways to convince the majority of the great houses to swing your way. The main method looks to be claiming and holding control points in areas of the deep desert, battling against other players in PvP. Win the territory, win the vote. (Image credit: Funcom) If you're not into PvP, you can still help your guild, and thus your faction, to secure votes. You can take on jobs to invade NPC bases and kill their inhabitants, such as a mission shown in the video where House Torvold requests you wipe out a certain amount of an NPC group called "sandflies." Another House requests a supply of groundcars, so you can win them over by gathering resources, putting together a production line, crafting enough vehicles to fill the order, then delivering them. You can check out the Landsraad explainer video below. Dune: Awakening launches June 10, with head start of June 5 for those who preorder the Deluxe or Ultimate edition. Dune: Awakening | Games of Power — The Landsraad Explained - YouTube Christopher Livingston Social Links Navigation Senior Editor Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own. You must confirm your public display name before commenting Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name. Dune Awakening's latest trailer offers a glimpse of its massive coriolis storms, which reshape swathes of the map each week for 'infinite exploration' Here's what happens to your base in Dune: Awakening if you take a long break from Arrakis Dune: Awakening: Everything we know about Funcom's survival MMO 'Don't leave trash on Arrakis'—Dune: Awakening creative director implores players to 'clean up your old bases' After 25 hours of the Dune: Awakening beta, I'm sold on it as a survival game but still a bit iffy on the MMO parts Dune: Awakening promises us a breath of fresh air, skipping early access for a full launch with no monthly subscription in May Latest in Survival & Crafting If you're 'scared of PvP', don't worry: Dune: Awakening's endgame deep desert area has a PvE zone, too A Roblox farming game made by a teenager 'in like three days' had 8.9 million players online at the same time—Steam peaked at 11.5 million across all games on the same day Escape from Duckov is coming back with a new demo Light No Fire: Everything we know about Hello Games' planet-sized survival game Mech farming sim Lightyear Frontier is getting a complete overhaul, adding a bigger map, massive tornados, and an interplanetary delivery cannon: 'It's been clear that we were not living up to the fantasy' Subnautica 2: All the key details on the survival-crafting sequel's dive into the abyss Latest in News A Concord commemorative wall plaque is being auctioned by Goodwill and bidding is already over $3,000 Helldivers 2 Chinese community valiantly holds the line to save 'Super China,' then flogs Arrowhead with negative Steam reviews for capping liberty at 99.9783% This Brazilian roguelike is a 'brutal test against history's oppressors' where you can battle the perpetrators of a 19th century atrocity with AoE knife magic The Game Informer archive just got upgraded with its entire backlog, so go experience the eye-melting world of '90s game advertising 4 years after being delisted, Lost Planet 2 finally got a Steam update to remove Games for Windows Live—but it also removed online multiplayer and blew up everyone's saves After a year and a half of updates, WoW Classic's Season of Discovery is finally winding down in favor of something new: 'We need to get in the proverbial kitchen and cook' HARDWARE BUYING GUIDES LATEST GAME REVIEWS Best Steam Deck accessories in Australia for 2025: Our favorite docks, powerbanks and gamepads Best graphics card for laptops in 2025: the mobile GPUs I'd want in my next gaming laptop Best mini PCs in 2025: The compact computers I love the most Best 14-inch gaming laptop in 2025: The top compact gaming laptops I've held in these hands Best Mini-ITX motherboards in 2025: My pick from all the mini mobo marvels I've tested To a T review: Not just wholesome, but wonderfully weird Turtle Beach Stealth 700 Gen 3 review Elden Ring Nightreign review: A messy co-op action RPG that shouldn't be this good F1 25 review: Commendable upgrades, but this is fundamentally the same game as before NZXT H3 Flow case review PC Gamer is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. 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