Funcom, the studio behind MMOs like Secret World and Age of Conan and survival games like Conan Exiles, invited TheGamer to take an early look at Dune: Awakening, its next game and first open world survival/MMO hybrid. Funcom has been running small closed beta tests for the game for some time, but now it's finally ready to show off some gameplay and talk about its big ambitions, which combines what the studio has learned from its past with a few new ideas that have never been done before.
Dune: Awakening is set in an alternate timeline where House Atreides and House Harkonnen are locked in an eternal war over control of Arrakis and its spice fields. The game is based on both the novels and the film series, and Funcom worked alongside the Frank Herbert Estate and Legendary Pictures to create this version of the world. Creative director Joel Bylos says the vision for the game is to create an expansive, everchanging space where players can live out their fantasy of living in the world of Dune.
At the start, new players will find many of the survival genre’s familiar trappings. When you first wake up naked in the desert, your top priority will be finding water. Some can be absorbed from plant fibers, but early on you may find the best source of water comes from people’s blood. The desert is harsh, and while Bylos says Awakening won’t be quite as punishing as some other survival games, kill or be killed is still a way of life on Arrakis.
RelatedDune: Part 2 Review - Rise Of Paul
Dune: Part 2 tells a more focused, structured story than Part One, and delivers one of the best examples of mainstream subversive cinema.
PostsBylos is also critical of the typical survival game loop, which tends to lose a sense of danger and urgency once you reach a certain level. He says Awakening will begin as most survival games do - gathering resources, building bases, crafting tools - but eventually it will become a game of political survival. Funcom wants to include the political intrigue that surrounds Dune’s story too, and while the details on how those system would work weren’t fully divulged, we know that players will be able to pledge themselves to a house, form their own guilds that can grow into House Minors, and compete with opposing factions for greater power.
One of the ways players will compete is in deep desert, PVP areas beyond the planet’s Shield Wall where violent Coriolis storms constantly reshape the landscape. These zones will be on a cycle that dynamically resets weekly, and players will need to establish outposts and compete for valuable resources each week before the storm wipes away everything they’ve built.
There’s some thoughtful design around base building that will appeal to those that like to design their survival game compounds. Anything you build can be blueprinted, which you can then take with you into the deep desert to quickly recreate your base as a temporary stronghold, or sell to other players in the in-game market to make a profit. Skill allotment will be limited, which Funcom anticipates will encourage players to specialize their skills and treat them like professions. If you want to be a sword maker and make swords, you can be a sword maker.
Of course, other players aren’t the only threat in the deep desert. Within moments of starting the game you’ll likely find yourself running away from a sand worm. Bylos says sand worms will be an unstoppable, ever-present force in Dune, and that it was important when designing those encounters to capture feeling and fear of being pursued by one. They can’t be killed, so you’ll have to learn how to live with them or die trying.
The biggest challenge around adapting Dune for an MMO must surely be in creating diverse landscapes and biomes. It was interesting to learn about the game before watching a screening of Dune: Part 2, because I was even more keenly aware that the Arrakis of the films is an endless sea of sand dunes and little else. Bylos points out that Funcom has always been good at working in all brown (a nod to Conan Exiles) and has worked hard to create a world that's imaginative, fun to explore, and visually diverse.
It’s hard to say how Frank Herbert would feel about players waging an eternal war for virtual spice in a pretend version of Arrakis. On the one hand, you might think he’d be disgusted at the idea of all the context being stripped away from his anti-imperial text, reducing it to iconography, big worms, and funny phrases about fear being the mind killer. On the other hand, maybe burning fossil fuels to run a machine filled with cobalt mined by children in the DRC in order to pass all of the leisure time our western lives afford is actually the most appropriate way to engage with Dune today. We’ll never know, but I do know flying around in an ornithopter looks pretty fun. I hope we get to ride the worms.
Next: 2024 Is The Year Cinematic Auteurs Overtake IP
