Final thoughts on this, as I probably won't get chance to play tomorrow (we have our own expansion launching).
Overall, better than expected and over a 6 hour stream today I didn't feel bored or lacking progression.
Few bugs in the time that I played which I'd previously mentioned, along with the initial crashes, but other than that it's been a relatively good experience.
Gorgeous looking and it's well implemented how the sand worms appear and traverse the land, plus there's never a feeling of lack of resources as they respawn so quickly so the game doesn't feel grindy, even though you are doing repetitive actions essentially.
I'm intrigued to find out more and see what the latter stages of the game are planned to be like as I've not read up much on it at all.
Only thing that confused me was when moving base as the game was saying make a new base and then abandon your old one, but your base & contents was then free to be picked clean by anyone, but I felt that was odd as you'd lose access to all your manufacturing ability until you built new ones, so I did 3 ferry runs on my bike, using the boost module to get back to my old base, then switching to the increased inventory module to bring the resources back. Only on the last run, with only a cargo of granite did I succumb to the worm. It's been great fun avoiding them for the most part
If I find out more about the latter stages and how it's planned to receive content then I might pre-order it.
I can fill you in on the later stuff. The main story takes about 60-80'ish hours to get through, That's not counting going around to find the other class trainers, Doing their missions and building up your base and farming for resources, For future reference when it tells you to abandon your base get by your sub-fief console, Go to the map, Abandon the base, And then immediately build a new sub-fief console and put it down, Reclaiming your base and losing nothing, you can then build a 2nd base in the northern parts of Hagga Basin if you wish.
Once done with the main story you still need to get to level 200 to get all your skill points, This can be done by re-running a lot of higher level imperial testing stations, Lots of loot too. Then there's the Deep Desert which yes is mainly PvP but the first row, Row-A -
Is purely PvE and you can get some decent materials from there for various items to craft, Just stay out of the shipwrecks as those are PvP zones. To get titanium ore you will need to venture into the PvP areas though but if you wait before the weekly reset there will be people clearing their temp bases and legging it out of there with their accumulated spice and ore, This is the time to quickly go mining but it is a small window as the monster Coriolis storm comes in and wipes everything out, Think monster sand storm with lightning from hell, It not only wipes everything out but changes the landscape so 1 week there may be ALL sand, The next week it may be nearly all sand and 1 bit of rocky terrain, Next could be mostly rocky terrain and only a bit of sand, It's completely random, But there will always be spice to farm and BIG ring mouth worms we saw in the recent movies that make the tri-jaw worms you see in Hagga look like small babies.
Then there's the landsraad which is a sort of voting system that influences the entire game world. In the landsraad system you go do chores for all of the smaller houses, You have to join either house Atreides or Harkonnen to take part, Then you start doing chores for the smaller houses like donating items, Armour, Money, Spice, Taking over an outpost, Taking part in PvP etc... at the end of the week the house with the highest number of smaller house wins will be that weeks landsraad winner and this brings with it some bonuses like reduced crafting costs, Increased mining/spice yields, No PvP in the deep desert, PvP in all of the Deep Desert including the armistice zone and so on and so on.
Then there's the story and map expansion which is meant to come out summer next year which is located at the polar caps of Arrakis and based around the water shipper families, You will get there via the overland map, Basically a little minigame where you fly your ornithopter off the edge of the map which then transitions from Hagga Basin or wherever you currently are to the overland map which then lets you go from one main BIG area to another BIG area instead of a loading screen. They did it this way as they said via a livestream this gives them a lot of breathing room for places you can visit as they can add entirely new massive maps with stuff to do that you can travel to in the future as they aren't tied down to 1 physical map.
Then there's all the inbetween updates that will see updates to graphics, Gameplay, Bug fixing, Additional missions, Maybe some Twitch drops here and there etc.... fun times ahead basically
