Ice, ice, baby.
Funcom's survival MMO Dune: Awakening is heading north with a free expansion that trades the deserts of Arrakis for a frozen new map.
The expansion, called Blood and Ice, will release on 1st December. Funcom said it adds "around 35 hours of new progression", along with new vehicle modules, augments, and specialisation traits. It's coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox.
The new map, called the Polar Sink, turns the game's usual survival loop upside down. Instead of protecting yourself from extreme heat, you'll need to find ways to stay warm, upgrading your gear with resources found only in the Polar Sink.
The map is split into two biomes, the tundra and the ice cap. You'll start in the tundra, where wealthy water shipper families have built lavish strongholds, before trying to get into the heavily guarded ice cap. Once you're in, you can harvest ice to cool your base equipment and speed up production.
According to Funcom, the expansion "brings the focus back to ground-level survival, with traversal, temperature management, and combat all playing important roles in your progression". The studio also said future updates will add more reasons to go back to the region.
Blood and Ice also brings a new Events tab to the main menu. Shortly after the expansion launches, a new event called Water Crisis will follow the current one, The Scourge. Funcom says every event can be completed in both single-player and multiplayer, and that it plans to run them more often, each with new stories and free rewards.
Funcom has also launched a cosmetics store, which it says will help fund continued development and free updates. The store will start with a rotating selection of items, including looks taken from the Dune films to coincide with Dune: Part Three's release in cinemas this December. The plan is to eventually make the full catalogue available at all times.
Several of the community's most-requested features are also on the way. Offline single-player is due this month, and from January 2027 you'll be able to copy characters from multiplayer servers to single-player, and from single-player to select private or self-hosted servers on PC. Full cross-play will also arrive in January 2027.
"We're far from done," Funcom said, adding that it has "ambitious plans for the year ahead", including major free updates in 2027. The studio says more than a million new players have joined since the game launched on consoles, alongside a rebuilt endgame, three DLCs, and the conclusion of the game's first story arc, Book One.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Norwegian developer Funcom, creator of Dune: Awakening and Conan Exiles - and many other games - confirmed it was entering a period of restructuring and bracing for layoffs as a result. You may remember the company making a similar move this time last year, months after the initial PC release of Dune: Awakening.
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Extracted and lightly reformatted for readability. · Source: en