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‘Dune: Awakening’ Embraces Player Agency & Leans Deep Into Novels To Flesh Out Arrakis And Beyond

A saviour to many and a nightmare to others, Paul Atreides drives the narrative in Frank Herbert’s series of Dune novels, and more recently, Denis Villeneuve’s soon-to-be film trilogy starring Timotheé Chalamet. While rooted in science fiction, it’s also a cautionary tale that readers have long been familiar with, involving the son of Duke Leto and a Bene Gesserit witch fulfilling a prophecy and rising to power, only to succumb to the trappings of it. 

Dune: Awakening Interview

Dune: Awakening, the forthcoming massively multiplayer online (MMO) survival game from Conan Exiles studio Funcom, paints a different picture. The first open-world game in the series marks a departure from its usual genre of strategy (with the occasional adventure undertaking), offering the tantalising opportunity to explore the arid, well, dunes of Arrakis, and encounter the countless dangers that dwell within. But there’s a catch – there’s no place for the Lisan al Gaib here, where the history as fans know has been rewritten. 

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In this alternate timeline, Duke Leto, played by Star Wars: The Force Awakens star Oscar Isaac in the recent movies, and Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård, Chernobyl) are both alive, sparking a persistent assassination war between the Houses of Atreides and Harkonnen, and setting the stage for the multiplayer experience. Like its MMO contemporaries, the interstellar outing will inherit staple features like guilds and large-scale PvP clashes, allowing players to pledge their allegiance to one of the two factions. 

The divergence from established canon also feeds into the narrative aspect as amid the vast map of Arrakis are nuggets of lore that have been fleshed out in ways that weren’t possible before, with some even bringing in major characters from the novels.

“It gives us a really cool breeding ground for a lot of smaller plots to happen up here. We’re including a lot of the bigger names from the books,” shares producer Nils Ryborg in an interview for select global media held at Funcom’s home turf in Oslo, Norway. “They all have their own little plans and goals and what they want, where they want the fate of Arrakis to end up, and the way we’ve gone about it is, how should the player, a no-name and a nobody, get to interact with all of this stuff?”

Dune: Awakening Interview
Dune: Awakening producer, Nils Ryborg.

The absence of a default protagonist means players are free to establish their own sense of identity. In the opening minutes of Dune: Awakening, they are tasked with crafting a backstory that forms the caste mechanic, including options for their home planet, field expertise, mentor, and more. Apart from encouraging player choice, the design philosophy acts as a foil to the core theme of prophecy – significantly explored in both the books and Villeneuve’s big-screen adaptations – even if it’s more restrained in play. 

“We removed the messiah figure, mainly because it became problematic [by] removing player agency. It’s very difficult to play a story when there’s a messiah who will change everything in front of you. We want the player to be able to have an impact on the story,” he stresses.

Ryborg is quick to highlight, however, that there won’t be entirely different stories based on their background, as the team is “not quite that ambitious” due to the game’s multiplayer focus. Instead, character interactions will vary depending on the choices: selecting the Atreides’ home planet Caladan as the place of origin, for instance, makes it easier to gain their trust, while a Harkonnen alignment would require more work to win them over. 

The feature is hardly new for role-playing games (RPG) and MMO enthusiasts, but it won’t be the only source of familiarity. Dune: Awakening, which uses Square Enix’s highly popular MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV as a reference point for some areas of development, introduces a skill tree system tied to five archetypes modelled after factions from the source material, including Swordmaster, Planetologist, and Bene Gesserit, with abilities reflecting each of their unique or distinctive traits. More than just a genre tradition, it serves to honour the game’s literary roots, which have also carried over to gameplay, such as shield mechanics. 

Dune: Awakening Interview (3)

Mirroring their firearm-resistant properties in the novels, shields offer full protection against traditional projectiles like bullets, and can only be disabled with specific weapons, or a slow, precise thrust of a dagger. The adherence to such detail represents a shift from the traditional shooting experience featuring depleting shields – there’s none of that here – and accentuates the Dune flair in a way that should delight fans of the written work. 

“Generally speaking, the book is the Bible, [and] we go to it first for a lot of things,” asserts the producer, adding that although the title’s visual art direction began before the release of the first film in 2021, inspiration was still pulled from Villeneuve’s “very striking universe”. 

“It’s been a combination of things, where we take influences from Villeneuve, but we have our own visual identity influenced by the books,” he notes. 

There’s just one slight issue, however. As the Oslo-based developer explains, the reading material focuses a lot on specific characters and the politicking of the world, leaving gaps in its description of the nitty gritty. The everyday man, for example, lacks detailed references, and the team would often find themselves inventing plenty of new elements to weave into Dune: Awakening, though it’s all done with approval from the Herbert Estate naturally.  

Other times, the half-blank slate fuels more original endeavours. Eugenics, another major theme of the series, has a place in the game’s story, taking the form of abandoned testing stations that serve as a nod to the experiments taking place on Arrakis before the Butlerian Jihad – the crusade against computers, thinking machines and conscious robots from 201 to 108 B.G., and the reason why technology never exists in Herbert’s sci-fi universe. 

Ryborg discusses their role in fleshing out the worldbuilding: “[The labs] have been a perfect breeding ground for a bit more creativity in individuals…What’s in them isn’t specified in the lore, which gives us a lot of freedom to explore and show different parts of Dune and the world outside of just Arrakis.” 

Still, its core tenets have undoubtedly held up over the decades. Despite the ambiguity surrounding certain subjects and the lack of prior knowledge of the narrative specifics in HBO’s Dune: Prophecy that aired last November, Awakening shares several overlapping elements with the 2024 show, which he calls a “funny” coincidence. 

“When we were watching the series, as it came out, we were like, ‘Wow, oh, you did that too!’” he laughs. “It’s been really rewarding seeing that we’re somewhat aligned mentally, even if we haven’t explicitly talked about certain things.” 

The team is taking things a few steps further. Not only is the game set on fulfilling fan expectations for easter eggs, but it will also include deep cuts that go beyond the novels, starting with Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s scrapped Dune adaptation way back in 1974. There was some progression with visual development before the cancellation, however, that featured bizarre, peculiar visions brought on by consuming spice, such as a burning giraffe – a variant of which can be found in Funcom’s take on the beloved universe.

For newcomers, Dune: Awakening seeks to offer an accessible experience (as much as possible, at least). The original lore is notorious for its convoluted nature, and while the idea of getting exposed to foreign-sounding jargon may be intimidating, Ryborg assures measures are in place to ease the learning curve. Entire cinematics, for starters, have been stripped down to facilitate understanding, while story beats will be explained as players progress. A codex-like mechanic is also scheduled to roll out, taking the form of data entries detailing the world and its happenings in the past and present. 

Series veteran or not, survival in the desert will be a challenge. Between giant sandworms, violent sandstorms, thirst, and powerful military surveillance in the nighttime, there are plenty of potential ways to die – sometimes even leading to the permanent loss of player inventory. But with risk comes reward and gratification, as the producer succinctly puts it, “Arrakis is the toughest planet to survive, [and] that’s a strong fantasy on its own.”  

Dune: Awakening comes to PC in early 2025, with a later release slated for the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.