At long last, the transfer of power is complete. Dune: Awakening, Funcom's ambitious survival MMO based on the classic sci-fi novel, has completed is pivot away from massive multiplayer, and can now be played fully offline.

The offline function arrived in an otherwise unremarkable patch that mainly fixes specific bugs and technical issues. "It's not possible to play the game in single-player mode without requiring an Internet connection at any point," Funcom revealed in a Steam post. This includes "creating and deleting single-player characters."

Dune: Awakening has been gradually drifting away from being a purely multiplayer experience for some time. In April, Funcom made its PvP element, like the Deep Desert and shipwreck exploration, fully optional. A fully fledged single-player mode arrived in September, including a dramatic rework of several major endgame systems—like its dynamic political "Landsraad" system' to make them work in solo play. At that point, single-player still required an Internet connection. Now though, that's no longer the case.

To be clear, Dune: Awakening can still be played with all its multiplayer and PvP trappings, now including a "Go Online" button for exactly that purpose. Nonetheless, it's been a fascinating shift in direction, one that, alongside games like Marathon, embodies a broader apparent trend away from large-scale. competitive multiplayer experiences toward smaller, cooperative communities. Whether with friends or alone, players increasingly want to be able to live in their own worlds, unbothered by the wider, more tumultuous encounters of the open Internet.

Whether this is a positive shift is up for debate—encounters with strangers on the Internet can provide highs as well as lows—but it's certainly an interesting one. Either way, offline mode isn't the end of Dune: Awakening's journey. A new expansion is coming in December, one that lets players explore Arrakis' frozen poles in a radically different scenario from the base game. Funcom appears to be in it for the long term with Awakening too, having recently pivoted to focusing purely on support for it and its other multiplayer survival game Conan: Exiles.

I could claim that I love real-time strategy games for their fast-paced decision-making. But what I truly love is building massive armies and wreaking havoc on an apocalyptic scale. So when I saw the trailer for Horu (via RPS), an in-development RTS that promises "hundreds of thousands of units" on screen, it went on the wishlist faster than you can say 'Zerg Rush'.

Horu is an upcoming strategy game inspired by Total War and Star Wars: Empire at War, aiming to blend the colossal battles of the former with the galaxy-scale strategy of the latter. It challenges players to establish their own interstellar empire, building vast space fleets and huge land armies to assume ultimate dominion of the cosmos.

While it's the spectacle of Horu that caught my attention, with clouds of spaceships trading laser fire and oceans of little men getting obliterated by artillery, there are a couple of more specific ideas and mechanics that also sound deeply exciting. Unlike the games that inspired it, Horu aspires to be fully real-time, with battles playing out simultaneously across the solar system. This includes both land and space battles, letting you do things like punch your dropships through an enemy's orbital fleet to land an army on the surface while the battle in space rages on.

This sounds rad, but also like it might be challenging to keep track of. Thankfully, Horu promises a few mechanics to keep the scale manageable. This includes a "drop zone system" that lets you assign a drop zone on a planet and queue up a set of orders, which the assigned army will then carry out automatically.

Other planned features include world colonisation and development, the ability to build spy networks and conduct espionage missions, space magic that'll let you cast devastating spells on the battlefield, and a fully simulated economy and research tree. There's even a system that lets you create boarding parties to take control of enemy ships and add them to your fleet.

All of this built by a solo dev who goes by GlassBeaver, who build his own custom engine to develop the game. Development has been underway for several years, but GlassBeaver has now taken the game to Kickstarter "to help fun the remaining assets, sound and music". The campaign is already halfway to reaching its goal of £16,685, so it looks likely to get over the finish line.

There's no specific release date for Horu yet, but GlassBeaver plans for the game to launch at the end of 2027. The next twelve months are shaping up to be big for space strategy more broadly, with Dawn of War 4 due to launch in December, and Total War: Warhammer 40,000 expected sometime next year.