Dune: Awakening's base building looks like a great way to spend some time ignoring that whole spice war thing
It's not much, but it's home
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I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. So I can only imagine how absolutely, overwhelmingly irritating it could be on a planet like Arrakis, where a sandstorm could quite easily kill you. Or, I suppose I don't have to imagine, as that's something you can actually experience in Dune: Awakening. This is a video we're talking about here though, meaning there are fixes for problems like these. Namely, base building, which Funcom showed off in a new video of the multiplayer game yesterday.
When you start out, your base probably won't be all that fancy or useful. If you've got nowhere to store your bike, it'll likely be wrecked by the time the storm's died down. Over time you can build up bigger and stronger bases, which you can do so either by yourself or with friends (or enemies, if you swing that way). You can then align yourself with one of the two main houses, Atreides or Harkonnen, allowing you to build unique structures depending on who you picked.
On top of that, you can build and craft your own vehicles. I generally loathe when games let me do this as they can often be a bit too complicated, but judging from the trailer it almost looks like putting bits of Lego together, so I'm down to clown. If you've built your base up enough, you can put up shields so it doesn't get damaged, but you'll literally be taxed for this. At least you'll have a garage to store your cool car.
Any of your creations and bases can be turned into blueprints that you can share with or even sell to other players. Once they have the blueprint, they can just make the thing instantly. I'm assuming you'll still need some resources to do this, but it looks cool! Kind of reminds me of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's Autobuild feature, albeit a bit more social.
As a reminder, if you looked at your calendar today and thought "gee whizz, May's the month I get to play Dune: Awakening", think again, as last month the game caught a three week delay. That means you'll be complaining about all that sand on June 10th. At least it'll be better sand than it would have been in May!