Dune: Awakening beta players extracted nearly 9 million liters of blood last weekend, enough to fill 3 Olympic-size, extremely gross swimming pools
Funcom has shared some stats on the Dune: Awakening beta that took place last weekend, and players certainly got up to some bloody business. The only substantial water supply in the early game is the blood of your enemies, and in four days of the beta players extracted 8,715,331 liters of blood from fallen foes (and potentially a few unlucky desert mice).
That's a lot of blood. That's so much blood you could fill three Olympic-size swimming pools, though I'm pretty sure they don't have the Olympics on Arrakis. What would the events be? Sandworm races? Slowest blade? Who can keep their hand in the Gom Jabbar box longest before that weird old lady neck-stabs them?
Three giant pools full of blood sounds gross, but players (usually) don't drink that blood directly, they put it into their blood purifiers and convert it to water. Players consumed a lot of water during the beta, Funcom says: 151,749 liters—about two regular, residential-size swimming pools—though when it comes to Dune that's really just a drop in the bucket.
Though Arrakis is arid and moisture is precious, the Fremen actually have huge underground reservoirs of water, comprising "more than thirty-eight million decaliters," claims Stilgar in the book (that would be about 150 Olympic-size swimming pools), and that's just a single pool of "thousands of such caches" the Fremen have hidden across the planet. A few pools full of water or even blood doesn't really stack up.
What else did players get up to over the beta weekend? Dying, a lot: 107,959 were swallowed by sandworms, 65,000 "withered away in the sun" (which I assume means died of dehydration quickened by sun exposure), and just over 10,000 died in the 30-second sandstorms that regularly sweep across the map.
Players did some killin', too, wasting nearly 10 million hapless scavengers (that's where all that blood came from), deploying 1.7 million turrets (a Mentat ability) and delivering 2.6 million "swordmaster knee charges," a sort of flying dash popular among melee fighters. The most-used ability by far was the shigawire claw, which can be used both to stagger opponents and grapple up cliffs or walls: the grappling hook was fired 8.4 million times over the weekend. At least 8 million of those were mine: I compulsively use it the second it recharges even if I'm not doing any climbing. It's just fun to yoink myself across a room instead of running.
You can check out the full Dune: Awakening stats here. The survival MMO launches on June 10.
2025 games: This year's upcoming releases
Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together