It's actually pretty well-designed. It reminded me a lot of another Funcom title, Conan Exiles, in that it has a strong survival-game element to it and a number of similar mechanics. In particular (and perhaps understandably, given the IP involved), it pays more attention to the weather than most modern MMOs do.
It's set in the universe of Frank Herbert's Dune novels, except in this version Jessica had a daughter. I'm not a fan of Dune, but D:A realised the setting very well. The progression was nicely managed, with a number of essentially vehicle-based gameplay shifts (on foot, sandbike, buggy, ornithopter; there was also a wheel, but that looked useless to me so I didn't bother with it).
I finished the main story quest, at least inasmuch as I reached as far as it got: it didn't end, so I assume further expansions will reveal more. I can't say I was enamoured of the storyline, as it messes with the player's sense of identity, but I'll probably check in with it offline when the next installment appears, to see if my suspicions of where it's going are correct.
I maxed out all the classes, although if I'd kept playing I could have gone up more levels and so taken advantage of a few extra points to allocate to my class skills (I was level 181 when I quit; the cap is 200, although I only found that out just now when I checked).
As I mentioned earlier, the weather in the game plays an important part; this is refreshing, given how many MMOs either ignore it or give it only cosmetic or fishing-minigame effects. Stay out in the sun too long and your water consumption rockets, so you always have to have some with you to keep topping it up. Water is a primary resource, obtained mainly from distilling it from the blood obtained from the many corpses you cause, but you can get it from plants at the right time of day and from collector units plonked atop your base. You can drink blood directly, instead of water, which I tended to do because if you're wading through bodies then there's a lot of it and you can easily fill your blood pouches. I wasn't pleased with this vampirism aspect, but at least you don't suck it out of characters when they're alive, and you use a machine rather than fangs.
Spice plays a big part too, but only in the latter stages. You need it to make most end-game items, with which I have no issue; however, you can also consume it to give yourself temporary special powers. The more you use it, the more you need next time. I don't approve of this aspect of spice, so never did use it except once to complete a main-story quest that teaches you how to use it and twice by accident. It's apparently addictive, so if you don't keep consuming it Bad Things happen; I don't know what these Bad Things are, because I didn't ever scoff enough to get hooked — just enough to turn the whites of my eyes blue.
I was pretty well set up when I quit, with plenty of money and a couple of well-sited bases. I was intending to leave when the impending server merges were implemented. They need to be implemented, too, because in my entire time in the game I only ever saw two other player characters, one each in the two main villages (Atreides: decent people; Harkonen: full-on authoritarian tyrants) (I went with Atreides). I also saw a buggy going around once that must have been driven by a player, and on my last day saw an ornithopter heading home in the deep desert (which is end-game land).
The reason I quit yesterday rather than waiting for the server merges as intended is that I was flying my ornithopter in the deep desert over a ship I'd just seen crash when suddenly a sandworm came out of nowhere and ate me, ornithopter and all. I felt this was a little disappointing. It isn't quite permadeath, but you do lose everything you have on you (plus your vehicle, if you were in one). However, the options offered to me this time concerning where to respawn seemed to imply that I wouldn't lose everything unless I respawned in a different zone. I hadn't been eaten by a sandworm in the deep desert before (although I had been three times in the Hagga Basin, which is where the non-end game is set), so figured that perhaps death-by-sandworm was different there. Because of this, I chose my temporary base in the deep desert as my respawn site, only to learn that I had indeed lost my ornithopter and everything that I had on me; I was standing in my underwear with nothing to my name but the emergency bottle of water that I'd left in the base. That wasn't going to be enough to fly me back to civilisation. Oh, and the whole zone is wiped by a storm once a week, so the base won't be there on Tuesday (this is why it's temporary and ill-equipped). It wouldn't take me more than an hour to gear back up at either of my other bases, but to get to them from the temporary one I would have had to have somehow found the materials to construct a new ornithopter and the machines to make it, before the desert consumed my temporary base. That seemed unlikely. There is a place there where you can hire an NPC pilot to fly you back, but as I didn't have any cash on me, and the place I could have looted to get some was a flight away, so that wasn't an option.
OK, so I could have just stood in the sun until I died of thirst and then respawned at a different base, but I figured that as I was planning on quitting soon anyway, it may as well be now.
Overall, Dune: Awakening was more fun than I expected it to be, from a designer perspective. I can see that a good many players might tire of the grinding for materials, but that's what you can expect from survival games so it's not as if they wouldn't have been forewarned.
Hmm, which MMO to play next? I think maybe I'll try Pax Dei.