It’s not easy to adapt a fictional property — The Lord of the Rings, say, or the DC Universe —into a massively multiplayer online game, or any kind of living game. Many have failed. The demands of a set canon are seldom compatible with an evolving online world, or a universe in which thousands of players are living their own hero’s journeys.
Funcom knows this: The Norwegian developer has been making MMOs since 2001’s Anarchy Online, including a licensed effort, Age of Conan. So, for survival MMO Dune: Awakening, Funcom, Frank Herbert’s estate, and Legendary (producers of the Dune movies) decided to do something very smart: change the Dune timeline and establish its own alternate history of Arrakis.
As teased in the game’s Summer Game Fest trailer and detailed in a new half-hour deep dive video, in Dune: Awakening’s setting, Paul Atreides was never born. His mother, Lady Jessica, chose to have a daughter instead of a son, tying her more closely to the Bene Gesserit; Jessica is trained as a truthsayer and foretells Doctor Yueh’s betrayal, so her husband, Duke Leto, survives and House Atreides isn’t wiped out in the attack on Arrakeen.
With Paul out of the picture, there’s a power vacuum, and more narrative room for players to feel like the heroes of their own stories. And House Atreides and House Harkonnen are evenly matched in a war for the future of Arrakis — a convenient setup for the factional gameplay that MMOs thrive on. But the essential political motivations of all the characters and players remain the same as in Frank Herbert’s original vision.
The Fremen are the final piece of this puzzle, and Funcom has chosen to put them at the center of a narrative mystery. The desert inhabitants of Arrakis have disappeared — supposedly wiped out, according to Imperium propaganda. What happened to them? Where did they go? Players are sent in search of the missing people, exploring their abandoned dwellings, rites, culture, and spirituality as they go. (I’d say the chances of the Fremen being added as a playable faction later on, perhaps in an expansion, seem pretty high.)
In terms of gameplay, the video is a little lighter on detail, but there are some interesting tidbits. A look at the character creator reveals that a choice of mentor determines your character’s starting ability: Choose a Mentat mentor and you’ll be able to scan enemies and objects for information; a Bene Gesserit mentor will teach you to use the Voice to compel characters to approach you (effectively a taunt); a Swordmaster background grants you a defensive stance. But you’ll be able to combine abilities from the different schools later in the game.
In a section of the video focused on the game’s closed beta and its online structure, creative director Joel Bylos said that Dune: Awakening’s endgame lies in an area called the Deep Desert. There, hundreds of concurrent players will engage in player-versus-player combat, harvest spice in big groups, and engage with an endgame political system.
Bylos also explained what makes the game an MMO. As opposed to a single-server, single-map game like Ark: Survival Evolved, Dune: Awakening will group multiple maps and servers together into “worlds” of thousands of players who can organize themselves into guilds. The starting area, Hagga Basin, supports a minimum of 40 players per server, but beyond that there are social hubs and the Deep Desert, where Bylos promised “many, many hundreds” of players will be able to play together. The Overland map is its own live server that links these locations, with players using Ornithopters and other transportation to move around it in real time.
Dune: Awakening has no announced release date, but it’s coming to PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. Funcom says it will show live gameplay at Gamescom, which runs from Aug. 21-25.
