Here, there are no paths to tread. Only power to claim.

[Vindred]

I decided to write out some notes of anything I find interesting during my livestream binge. These will be a bit disorganized other than being more or less in chronological order as I watch them.

Livestream 1

Keys to desert variety: Verticality, props, points of interest.

Garages were added because of player feedback.

Jeff Gagné: "We play the game so much(...)it's hard to know what you don't know, right?"

Nobody knows if the sandstorm doors squish you! Jeff Gagné thinks it just pushes you. Surprised I didn't try this during closed beta.

NPC ornithopters can ferry you between trade posts and cities like FFXIV rental chocobos and I'll bet absolutely everyone appreciates that comparison.

34m There are actually many worms across the map who only stalk their own territories.

40m You can collect items related to finishing a contract without even possessing the contract. I observed this in beta, but glad to hear it is intentional and not an oversight.

"tidal dust" = quicksand

49m Ornithopters can barrel roll. Wing orientation is dynamic and based on maneuvers and beating ceases on a glide.

51m There are so many flat-topped pedestal rocks in this area.

53m Caverns big enough to fly ornithopters through.

54m No sandworm in subterranean areas.

55m Every shipwreck in the game is PvP, with the exception of the first one. Primary draw for shipwrecks is mainly weapon components, where PvE testing stations are mostly geared for vehicle components. You can technically find these components in other ways, but it is not as efficient.

57m Jeff seems to be implying here that NPC vendors will sell the components for solaris.

1h1m The overland map is a representation of the northern hemisphere of Arrakis. Top down view of thopter on map. Movement on the map costs fuel and water is used up with time, and there are little fuel and water deposits you can visit to increment them. Effectively a mobile-grade minigame to facilitate a transition between instances(not a dig). Current destinations: Atreides social hub, Harkonnen social hub, Hagga Basin, Deep Desert.

1h2m Entering cities costs a fee in solaris.

Skipped audio/music discussion and some parts of preorder rewards discussion to 1h43m

1h44m commitment to never sell power

1h46m Small strip of territory on the southern border of Deep Desert is PvE

1h47m Suggestion that solo PvE players will be able to avoid combat in PvP areas by "lurking around"

1h51m Deep Desert will be 576km² shared by "several hundred players" Jeff suggested some talk of having a thousand.

1h53m Jeff suggests here that the Deep Desert is in fact 98% PvP, probably misspeaking, says there are "really, really, really big shipwrecks."

1h56m There are wind traps, but not like the ones in Dune 2000

1h57m You can stand on top of an ornithopter in flight and fire hand weapons from it, and that you can shigawire to it. Ole Andreas claims during development they carried five people on a heavy thopter. Looking forward to the experiments to determine the limits of this.

1h58m Vehicles can be armed, and passengers riding on vehicles can fire from their seats.

2h Private servers being looked into, no promises.

2h1m "Season Pass" is actually referred to as that name because of a quirk with steam dlc bundles.

2h2m When you die in PvP, you lose durability to equipped items, any carried spice, and carried solaris, any resources, "and things like that"

As of this moment, we're 20 minutes out from Livestream 4, so I think I'll watch them out of order and see that one next and come back to 2 and 3.

[Vindred]

Livestream 2

23m Melee and ranged focused characters are intended to be balanced with one another in terms of success

25m "The paradigm we work with is, one enemy is fine, two will provide a challenge, and three should be hard."

26m Ranged combat is supported by lore and is mentioned "many, many times" in Herbert's work.

27m More mention of drillshot mentioned in Livestream #4, drills can be dodged away from while still stuck in shield.

30m In lore, if you fire a lasgun at a shield, it causes a nuclear explosion, so lasguns refuse to fire at shielded targets, explained as a safety feature to prevent this. That's an opportunity to balance a unique category of weapon, I suppose, but my goodness, how ridiculous. This is like those old Superman comics where he sneezes and whole galaxies get blown away by the force of it.

33m I'm curious of the "Much cooler version" of whirlwind.

35m Spice prescience doesn't just allow capstone abilities to work, but also increases all your damage from melee, ranged and abilities, lowers all of your cooldowns significantly, and makes you immune to poison. wut gonna be an addict.

47m NPCs draw from the same abilities as the player.

48m Suggestion that NPCs may get later updates to make them smarter about when to reload their weapons versus shielded user.

56m Spice prescience fades over time and there is both a cooldown on building it again, and you develop tolerance with repeated use of spice. The duration of the first use of spice prescience five minutes, where his second use lasted four minutes, fifty-eight seconds, so tolerance doesn't seem to build up very quickly.

1h4m Frequent repeated use of spice prescience can cause hallucinations.

1h11m Cactus can be grown indoors, despite Joelish interpretations of lore ; You won't do damage to your party members in deep desert with normal darts and melee, but any attacks with an AOE component, including flamethrower, do some friendly fire damage, though less than normal.

1h21m You can finish a dungeon in the deep desert with a 4p party and then be kicked out and killed.

1h22m There's the new whirlwind.

1h53m The expectation is that people who enter Deep Desert PvP for the first time will have 100h of played time by that point

1h57m Difference between durability degradation of melee/ranged weapons is negligible ; Ammunition is intended to be cheap

2h Sardaukar are actually rare within the game. The troops who drop from their dropships are actually CHOAM mercenaries.

[Vindred]

Livestream 3

25m Dune is starting out with fewer building sets than Conan... for now.

43m Natascha is correct to point out being able to move chests around your base while they still contain items. That's a QoL feature I haven't seen in any other survival game.

44m Twitch drops again, hey great. Definitely do this constantly. Go make it EGS exclusive while you're at it. Everyone loves this corpo ♥♥♥♥.

55m Another good look at the Atreides building set.

57m Atreides internals + Caladan Palace preorder set, + preorder sand bunnyrat.

59m Harkonnen base set.

1h9m Far less annoying way to incentivize watching the stream than dritch twops.

1h14m Ubisoft escapee.

1h18m Alternate timeline was chosen to give the player agency in the story, specifically to 'get rid of Paul'

1h23m They are trying to do an excellent story even if strong stories aren't usually associated to survival games.

1h26m Characters you encounters aren't throwaways. They will reuse their characters in future content.

1h36m The Harkonnen vs Atreides war has been going on for 10 years at the time the player joins the world.

1h40m Crys Knife undercover as an agent of house Pepsi.

1h47m More confirmation that everything in Deep Desert will be marketable.

1h49m Players are concentrated in social hubs so that they are populated and lively.

1h50m As expected, the Landsraad is the "endgame activity driver".

1h55m Natascha refers to the Landsraad as a bingo card of the week, as the session can be won before week's end by completing 5 tasks in a straight line across the board. Otherwise the winner is determined by number of tasks completed.

2h15m To-be-introduced 3rd faction's primary role is to act as a means of balancing the atreides and harkonnen to prevent permanent landslides.

2h16m Tax cycle is on a two week cycle, but you can put it off for one cycle so you can get away with paying once per four weeks.

2h18m You can have up to three bases.

2h19m Players are encouraged to clean up their old bases in order to make room in starting areas for newer players. Mister Knife: "This is one of the things that I..." [had to deal with in Conan].

2h24m Building costs are intentionally set lower than the standards of the genre.

2h28m The bank is intended for long-term storage, especially if you put the game down for a long time.

[Vindred]

Livestream 4

21m Drillshot rifle fires drill shots that shotdrill right through shields by first shottin real fast, but then drillin reel slo. Disruptors vary speed and electrical charge to force the shield to constantly fluctuate to adapt so that the power drains faster. Just like frequency and modularity cycling when using phasers against cube harkonnen.

30m Heavy and slow blade attacks are now distinct. Lots of balancing for stagger locking and stamina cost. .

32m Game's philosophy is that inventory is meant to be supplemented by vehicle inventories ; Turreted, multi-crew vehicles.

33m Extremely deep trenches act as an alternate biome

35m Atreides base building set looks nice

36m Vehicle inventories anywhere on land claim accessible from storage view. This justifies having a garage, even if you have a vehicle backup tool.

37m Mid-tier ornithopter construction demonstration

39m "Variants" are distinct shapes for a given vehicles, "Swatches" are color combinations; Harkonnen thopter designs more closely resemble "insects" so fellow dragonfly enjoyers have a strong incentive to join or betray Harkonnen

40m Cosmetics on character are limited to armor within the same armor class; Ornithopters have distinct hover/straight-line flight modes, and wing movement reflects that, as well as actuating while maneuvering.

I really like ornithopters.

41m Altitude limit for thopters enforced by increasing fuel use rate rather than hard wall, which is a great way to do it.

42m PLANTS! ; Solo gameplay will take longer and be harder than with a group.

43m Twitch Drops ffs ; Fabricators are a lore concession made to game design.

44m More detailed information of precisely how circuits work.

45m Solido projections of PLANTS. He says that they are presented as projections because it would violate Dune lore to have actual plants. But we just saw plants growing outside at around 42m, soooo... can get we a cutting? Bulb? Seed? ...spore? Half kidding, projections are fine, but plants that need to be watered in order to please high lore priest Joel would be fun too.

47m Vehicle backup tool stores up to 10 sand bikes and light scout ornithopters whose inventories are empty

49m Visual demonstration of ornithopter resource scanner range

50m Arrakeen looking keen

51m Radio stations broadcast programs that are tied in story to actual named NPCs in the world.

52m Taxation, smaller bases paying far less

55m New locations will be added to overland map with both DLCs and as part of timed events/content drops.

58m One of the mentioned instanced overland map dungeons

1h1m Story picks up momentum at 30 hours in. Prior to that, it serves mainly to service learning the game

1h6m "to collect industrial quantities" of spice, you must venture into the deep desert.

1h7m Capture & Hold PvP

1h8m Goodness gracious, how big is this thing supposed to be

1h13m Deep Desert is trying to be an infinitely exploreable area first and foremost, with everything about it built around that notion.

1h15m Endgame revolves around Landsraad

1h16m The expectation is that the player will set up a base in the PvE area of Deep Desert in order to explore it ; There is no water in DD

1h17m Building costs are half in the deep desert, and refund rate for deconstruction is 100% (since the buildings go away every week)

1h19m Building blueprints store only the actual building pieces, while placeables and deco will need to be added manually.

1h20m PvE section of DD is 20km long

1h22m Blueprints found in DD vary weekly, so you don't get the same ones multiple weeks in a row

1h23m Carrier ornithopter is GIGAWIDE ; Example of a weekly map change

1h25m Transport thopter carries other vehicles. Five passenger seating capacity. Plus all the lunatics who want to ride on top, apparently.

1h26m Spice blow seen from long distance.

1h27m PvP is intended to focus on capture and hold of control points.
The spice blow harvesting seems impossible for a solo.

1h29m Overhead markers for teammates are exclusively for 4p groups ; full friendly fire, even for guildmates ; distrust is intentional

1h30m Server transition in deep desert seems seamless.

1h32m Sandworms can be lured away from spice mining operations with the deployment of thumpers ; sand mining requires multiple people all attending to various jobs as a team

1h34m "We can talk about the meaning of reskin" "Some of the best games in the world are reskins of other games." Correct take.

1h35m Every item in Deep Desert is marketable

1h36m Accidental perfect size comparison of Shai-Hulud and a stinky ordinary worm

1h39m Deep Desert will always be adjusted so that it always constitutes the endgame

1h43m Ornithopter surfing is officially sanctioned

1h45m Dew Reaper harvest rate is actually affected by time of day, peaking just before sunup

1h55m Exchange is shared by all players on a world ; there will be hundreds of worlds at launch.

1h58m Deep desert is every man for himself ; Guilds on the same side are expected to compete with one another ; example given, PvE and crafting guilds are expected to compete against PvP guilds in Landsraad goals(...isn't that still technically PvP?)

1h59m there is a "very short vulnerability window" during which the shields drop and are vulnerable to raiding in the PvP sections of deep desert.

2h Main story does not require you to have picked a faction ; your guild has to be faction-aligned to participate in the Landsraad.

2h3m When you die in PvP, you lose all carried spice, resources, solaris, and all equipped gear takes durability damage. Unless there is a Landsraad-induced event to make PvP full loot. So no matter what, you are still losing part of your gear, due to durability damage.

2h4m Discussion of an npc vendor that sells blueprints of dev bases during testing.

2h7m Yes, there is content that you can only have if you participate in PvP ; Assurances that guilds will not be able to cover the space effectively enough to crowd anyone else out, but you will always risk losing what you find there to people in large guilds.

2h8m "The people who care most about having top tier gear are PvPers" An... interesting perspective.

2h9m Transport ornithopters can pick up and carry other ornithopters. ; You can pick people up with it if they are seated in a vehicle

Overall, it sounds pretty good, although all of my suspicions about the limitations on PvE players is confirmed. The game loves players who engage in guild versus guild action in DD above all others, it loves solo PvE types the least.