The Dune game feels pleasingly authentic, and might even influence the next movie

Dune Awakening, the new survival game based on Frank Herbert’s sci-fi universe, feels surprisingly authentic to the recent Hollywood movies, but at the same time fleshes out the Villeneuverse with new ideas we haven’t yet seen on screen, or in the books.

Last year, Funcom revealed that Awakening takes place during an alternate history timeline of the Dune story, when protagonist Paul Atreides isn’t even born. In this Timeline, Lady Jessica has a daughter instead, meaning events don’t play out quite the same way on the planet Arrakis.

Check out our exclusive Dune Awakening gameplay video:

This makes the Dune video game a genuinely interesting ‘what if?’ for fans, where the Fremen have been all but wiped out and a power vacuum exists on the desert planet, while simultaneously giving Funcom the freedom to flesh out its own playground in the universe. However, according to game director Joel Bylos, it was all a bit of a happy accident.

“The reason for the alternate timeline, and why we weren’t allowed to show the Fremen, or at least have the Fremen at launch, was because we were originally planning to launch the game before the release of the second movie,” he told VGC at a recent preview event. “And Villeneuve hadn’t fully developed the second movie Fremen when we started talking about this.

“So the constraint on us was like, ‘we want to show the Fremen in the second film, so you can’t show them when you launch the game. You can add them in an update after the second movie comes out’. And then, of course, here we are a year after the second movie came out, not having launched yet, going, ‘shit, we don’t have any Fremen yet to show.’ And that’s fine: there are echoes of the Fremen, you find Fremen’s stuff in the game, you just don’t meet the Fremen yet.”

According to Bylos, the somewhat forced decision to move into a non-canon narrative for Awakening has had the benefit of allowing it to be more creative with the game world, even allowing for some famous book characters to feature in alternative roles.

“The issue was with Fremen; it was not spoiling anything character-wise from the movie, not talking about events that would show up in the movies. Which is why the alternate history was our way of sidestepping away from that and giving us more space.

“And also, we wanted a specific setup; we wanted Atreides and Harkonnen on the planet fighting so players can use their faction and things like that. So I think yeah, the alternate history kind of allowed us to sidestep some of those constraints, and it also gave us just freedom to create the world we wanted.”

The game director said that despite the significant narrative changes, the game’s development team is no less committed to the source material. During development, both Villeneuve’s team and Frank Herbet’s son, Brian, were consulted – and it shows.

We came away from our 8 hours with Dune Awakening most impressed by the game’s authenticity to matching the overall look and feel of Villeneuve’s movies. The score, composed by Funcom’s regular collaborator Knut Avenstroup Haugen, sounds pleasingly evocative of Hans Zimmer’s thunderous film music, and its characters, vehicles, and cities share the distinct visual language from the films.

“We wanted Atreides and Harkonnen on the planet fighting so players can use their faction and things like that. So I think yeah, the alternate history kind of allowed us to sidestep some of those constraints, and it also gave us just freedom to create the world.”

“When we’re showing elements that are in the film, we have to be somewhat styled towards that. But when we’re moving away from that, we just run it by Legendary [Entertainment] to check that the design language feels like it fits in the universe,” Bylos explained.

“We have an approval process with Legendary. They see all our concept art [and] they let us know if this is going to be good enough, or not good enough, or if we’re developing something in one direction and maybe in the new movie, they’re developing in a different direction, and we sort of talk about what that means, and whether we should pull ourselves more towards them.”

With its harsh desert environments, factions battling for resources, and monstrous worms lurking under the sands, the world of Dune already feels tailor-made for a survival game. With Funcom’s experience building Conan Exiles, it’s little surprise that, in the opening hours at least, the gameplay fundamentals here feel right. The world is massive and fun to explore, the crafting and skill trees vast, and there are several unique survival mechanics that feel appropriate for the Dune universe.

At the core of this is thirst. Players start off stranded on Arrakis, with no water and no Stillsuit, and their first challenge is to find shelter and sustenance. A thirst meter shows how much water players have, while another meter indicating shade encourages you to stay out of the sun. Initially, you must extract what little water you can from the few plants left – but not too much, or you’ll be sick. Later, once you’ve gained enough equipment, you’ll be able to extract it from the blood of AI enemies and rival players.

It’s combat where Funcom has expectedly decided to make some tweaks to the Dune universe, while at the same time sticking to its ‘lore first’ mantra. Shooting weapons – effectively absent from the book lore – are made possible by the lore explanation that guns are now fitted with a safety mechanism that shuts them down when aimed at a shielded enemy – something that would cause a nuclear explosion in the books.

There’s also a special type of dart weapon invented just for the games, a ‘disrupter’, which fires darts at variable rates and sets off an EMP if they get through, disabling a player shield. This allows for more traditional shooting combat, while keeping melee combat core to the experience.

“Initially, you must extract what little water you can from the few plants left – but not too much, or you’ll be sick. Later, once you’ve gained enough equipment, you’ll be able to extract it from the blood of AI enemies and rival players.”

Awakening has been in closed beta for over a year, and feedback has led to several key iterations, notably to the way melee combat works. Unlike shooting, sword combat is an important part of the Dune books and movies, and it’s taken more than a few versions for Funcom to settle on its current mechanics, which has players striking with a primary attack until an enemy is stunned, and then launching a second slow blade attack for the killer blow.

“I think it’s maybe going to be the most… I don’t know about ‘divisive’, but it’s going to be one of the things that’s most difficult for us to teach players, because they’re not used to that kind of shield play,” says Bylos.

“Originally, melee was kind of a bit soft. It started off with a Call of Duty style stab, which I didn’t think felt right for Dune. It then evolved towards more of a Space Marine style, where we had shooting, and then you could pump a button to go into combo mode. And that felt good, but it didn’t allow for the abilities the way we wanted them to be.

“And then, eventually, we ended up with where we are now. So yeah, it went through a bunch of iterations, weaving between different things. And then shields were always the really hard part of this because the slow blade penetrates the shield, projectiles should not pass through shields. And it was just figuring out that whole dynamic that was like very complicated, very complex, and very difficult to try and figure out.”

One of the most compelling parts of Dune Awakening for me, however, is the gameplay away from combat. As is expected from a modern survival game, base buildings is a key feature here, and in our session we assembled a fairly complex three-story building, by placing its walls and stairways like Lego.

Bylos hints at a more significant pacifist ethos in the end game, however, where players can get ahead almost entirely by crafting and trading, or playing the political options of its servers.

“I think it’s maybe going to be the most… I don’t know about divisive, but it’s going to be one of the things that’s most difficult for us to teach players, because they’re not used to that kind of shield play.”

“Star Wars Galaxies was one of the original sandbox inspirations for this game,” the director explains. There are things in place for players to become better at crafting over time, but right now, the best example I can give for our game is how cartography works.

“There’s a surveying system, and when you survey, it reveals a fog of war in an area of the map. You can, if you have the right feats, then craft those maps and sell them at the auction house to other players. They can buy it, consume it, and it will then reveal all the information you had on the map at that location of the world.”

Key to map crafting, Bylos explains, are the more than 80 sectors of the Deep Desert area of Arrakis, which contains some of the rarest loot in the game. It takes players up to eight hours to explore all the Deep Desert, and every week it’s wiped by a sand storm and returns changed. So if a Cartographer player has a map to a rare item within the Deep Desert one week, that could make them a lot of money.

Another key part of the end game we were told about involved the Landsraad decrees, which will allow players to vote for sweeping server-wide changes based on your faction allegiance. In theory, this will make for drastically different experiences between servers, such as allowing PvP in certain areas, or giving certain factions an advantage.

“For example, the game does not have full PvP looting by default, but you can turn that on via a server decree,” Bylos explains. “In the beta, we’ve seen this caused players to move into the Deep Desert, because at least there it’s pure PvP battles.

“There are other things like it changes to crafting costs across the entire faction. So the Atreides can craft things for 33% cheaper than anyone else on the server for the next week, which changes the dynamics of the economy.

“The game does not have full PvP looting by default, but you can turn that on via a server decree. In the beta, we’ve seen this cause players to move into the Deep Desert, because at least there it’s pure PvP battles.”

“How that plays out over time, we’ve kind of yet to see, but hopefully it leads to this interesting dynamic. The thing that we’re cognizant of, it can also become a bit of a landslide of victory after victory, which is why the uannounced third faction is so important, because they’re kind of the, let’s say the Joker in the deck.”

We left our day-long play session with Dune Awakening impressed by its authenticity and ideas, genuinely wanting more. However, as pointed out in our Exoborne hands-on, these sorts of games are always more fun in a bustling preview event environment, and it’s never been more difficult to tell which games are going to succeed in the harsh modern games market.

One thing that may have already left its mark is Funcom’s work with Legendary. Denis Villeneuve is currently planning the third Dune movie, based on the book Dune Messiah. This presented yet another area of the universe Awakening’s developer had to be careful with – but it may yet influence the wider Dune franchise.

“I like to think that sometimes as they work, they’ll start to look at our concepts and be like, yeah, actually the way that they’ve done this is good,” says Bylos. “I mean, I don’t know if Legendary will be upset with me for saying that, but they have access to everything we’ve made and hopefully they look at it and consider it as, you know, as I’d expect reasonable people do.”

He added: “We have a good open relationship, but I don’t know how much Denis plays games or looks at them… There was one thing, that old history trailer that I showed today, there was that shot of Paul standing in front of that big stone mural. We used to have him sitting on a throne because it’s in the future, of course, and we were told, ‘no, no, no, you can’t have that’ – not because it was wrong, but because it looked like something Denis might have done.”