Arrakis Is FREEZING — Dune: Awakening’s FREE Blood and Ice Expansion Launches December 1, and Offline Play and Cross-Play Are Finally Coming

Arrakis is about to get cold. Funcom has announced Blood and Ice, a free expansion for Dune: Awakening that launches December 1 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox, taking players to the frozen north of the planet in an entirely new map called the Polar Sink. The reveal came in a new developer video that also laid out the next three to four months for the open-world survival game — including two of its most-requested features finally getting dates.

The Polar Sink is a different kind of survival problem. The map is split into two biomes: a tundra, where wealthy water-shipper families defend their lavish strongholds, and beyond it a heavily guarded ice cap, where securing access to ice becomes the central goal. Gear built to survive the desert heat will not cut it up there — equipment needs upgrading to withstand the cold, and temperature management joins traversal and combat as a core part of progression. Funcom says the new map offers around 35 hours of progression, with reasons to return for valuable resources: harvested ice can cool base equipment and speed up production, and the expansion adds new vehicle modules, augments, and specialization traits.

The timing makes sense. Funcom says more than one million new players have joined Dune: Awakening since its console launch, on top of the PC audience that has been braving the Deep Desert since day one. The game, inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune and the recent blockbuster films, drops players into an alternate-history Arrakis where Paul Atreides was never born — and Blood and Ice is its biggest step forward since launch.

To help support continued free updates, Funcom is also opening a cosmetics store with outfits, vehicle variants, and new ways to customise bases. It launches with rotating items — including recognisable looks from the films — and a later update will make the full catalogue available at all times. The purchases are optional, and Funcom is explicit that they exist to fund more free content like this expansion.

The events calendar is filling up alongside it. Following The Scourge, an event about investigating a disease spreading across Arrakis, a Water Crisis event arrives shortly after Blood and Ice, with players fighting over scarce water supplies. Funcom calls these the game’s biggest events yet, with new gameplay and locations, and a new Events tab launching with the expansion will track progress and rewards. The studio plans to run events more frequently from here, with new stories and free rewards.

The biggest news for a lot of players, though, is what is coming around the expansion. Offline single-player arrives in November — ahead of the expansion itself. Character copying follows in January 2027, letting players move characters from multiplayer servers into single-player, and from single-player onto select private servers. And full cross-play, one of the community’s longest-standing requests, also lands in January 2027. Funcom CEO Scott Junior summed up the roadmap simply: “We’re far from done,” pointing to ambitious plans for 2027 with several major free updates still to come.

Dune: Awakening is available now on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox, and is also on Game Pass. Blood and Ice launches December 1, free for every player on every platform. Funcom has been busy across its whole survival catalogue lately — Conan Exiles Is Getting a FREE PS5 Upgrade — and Cozy Hit Aloft Is Flying to PS5 Too — and the wider survival-MMO space keeps heating up, with ArcheAge Is BACK — ArcheAge Chronicles Hits Steam Early Access November 3 for $29.99 right around the corner.

Source: GamesPress — Dune: Awakening Blood and Ice announcement.

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