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Interview: Dune Awakening Dev Explains How They Tackled The Immense Lore To Craft A New Online Survival Game

Alessandro Fillari Posted:
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With Dune: Awakening, we're finally getting a game to explore, survive, and hopefully thrive on the desert planet of Arrakis. Though Frank Herbert's Dune has seen its fair share of game adaptations, Funcom's upcoming online open-world survival game is the first to let players explore the dangerous planet at their own leisure – all while navigating its treacherous political landscape and avoiding some sandworms.

While at Tokyo Game Show 2024, I played the opening hour of Dune: Awakening's survival experience, where I learned the ins and outs of staying alive on Arrakis by finding scraps of resources and taking out raiders for their gear. I also spoke with game producer Nils Ryborg about making the first open-world game within the Dune universe and why an online survival game was the way to go.

When you look back on the Dune games, they've mostly focused on the strategy genre along with a few adventures games as well. What's interesting about Dune Awakening is that it's the first open-world game for this franchise. How has been diving into that universe to build out a game like this?

It's been a fun and interesting challenge trying to dive deeper into that universe. As you mentioned, previous Dune games have mostly focused on grand strategy. So, of course, we pull a lot from the books, but we found that many of the details within them tend to be very macro-based – like they have big stories that focus on what happens between the planets on a huge political scale. So, we've had to do a ton of research to figure out more about what things are like on a lower level for the average characters to incorporate that into the ground-level survival experience. When you interact with characters in the game, you'll be able to see a bit more of a human experience and what things are like for them specifically.

That's what we're very excited about, really getting to show the diversity of life in Arrakis. Within films or books, you often see one big desert, but Frank Herbert was huge in the details of everything. Like the book came out of him researching how deserts work, right? That was his little passion project. When you explore Arrakis, there is a fair bit of diversity in the planet's actual biomes. That's something we've been trying to capture to ensure that you get an interesting player experience for exploration, but also you get to see more of what the planet is really like. We've worked all that into the survival mechanics. So, for instance, how will you get water on Arrakis? Of course, there are polar caps, which you'll get to later on. There are instances where you can get dew off plants as well because there are plants in Arrakis, but there are not a lot. Then, you explore places like the logical testing stations, like the things left behind from some ages ago that may hold some resources.

Players are interacting with other pieces of the universe and things left behind from before the Butlerian Jihad. So, getting to explore more aspects of the books that weren't always expanded upon, but like that, are things that you as a title would really like to get into.

Related:

Watch Nearly 30 Minutes of Dune: Awakening Gameplay

Previously, Funcom worked on Conan Exiles, which is another survival game based on a known franchise. What are some key lessons you all learned from the making of that game?

Yeah, that's a great question. There are many things we wanted to do better with Dune Awakening when it came to survival and player experiences. Really, we looked at everything we did with Conan, like the leveling system, for instance. Every aspect of that game inspired us to play this one. We've got a bigger world; we have more story elements, more biomes, and more things to do regarding activities with the different factions. In Dune Awakening, we place great importance on the NPCs, because Dune has always been a very political story, right? That element is something we try to capture within this game, so as you get into the endgame portion, that becomes more politically focused as you create actual guilds and then influence the planet's political landscape.

We're always looking for different ways to fit the Dune IP to fit our survival experience. But going back to Conan Exiles, one specific element we looked at from that game was the food resource system – food was a huge part of that game. But with Dune Awakening, we focused more on water survival. Water and spice are iconic parts of Dune, and we wanted to capture that dynamic of precious resource management. It's been a matter of ensuring that we make sure the game fits the lore of Dune while still ensuring we're making the survival game we're going for.

I felt that Dune: Awakening does a good job of contextualizing the survival experience. I admit that I often feel myself fighting with other games that try survival due to how many resources to keep track of. But with this game, I feel the context of the Dune lore and how life on Arrakis works helps to give more of an understanding of the survival loop.

Yeah, we put a ton of work into it, and we're still tweaking the back and forth of the different systems. We do want it to be harsh regarding how survival works, but it has to be playable as well. It's a survival game, so we're still trying to find that right balance. But marrying those aspects of the lore is the one thing that hasn't actually been a challenge. The game director's mantra for the game is, "Make the game fit Dune, don't make Dune fit the game." Dune is our base, to begin with, so we went forward conceptually with things like the sandworm and its movement, avoiding the direct sunlight, and having to travel at night to avoid danger.

A big part of the early game is acquiring a Stillsuit to help retain water, which drains very quickly. Water is scarce, and you need to try to get it very quickly at the start of the game. So, of course, it's always a lot of effort to refine the game design to marry details from the source material. There's a need for a ton of play testing and seeing how it all works, but it's always so different between players. Some people will pick it up quickly and say,  "This is way too easy."  But then you'll have another player sitting right next to them going, "This is impossible, no one could ever play this game, right?" Trying to make it feel like a challenge without being a chore is always a struggle with survival games. That's where all the finessing and the fine tweaking of things comes in. But with our experience from Conan Exiles, we're running betas at the moment, getting a ton of player feedback, and tweaking it. So by launch, we're hoping to have it in a really strong state where everyone can enjoy it.

From the hands-on I played and the previous gameplay showcases we've seen, the game puts a lot of focus on the main story – and it's interesting to see this alternate universe story about Dune without a Paul Atreides, and how that changes things. 

Yeah, one of the things that's interesting about the books is that there are so many interesting characters, and you always want to see more of them. But, spoiler for anyone who has yet to read the books, a lot of those characters, like Duke Leto Atreides, Piter De Vries, and Duncan Idaho, end up dying pretty early into the story. You never really get to see that much of them in the first book. But when you look at Paul Atredies' larger story, he's a force of nature and the chosen one for the universe. He can see the future and knows where the universe is going, but he cannot affect it – which is the big tragedy for his character.

For Dune: Awakening, we're going with a timeline where he wasn't born, which allows us to interact with the universe in a way where the player can have some agency over what's going on. It's also a chance for us to actually see the characters like Duke Leto or Duncan and have them play a larger part in our story, which we think is really exciting. So it's helped open up the game to be much more friendly to better gameplay experiences without having to stick so closely to the main thread of the books.

You mentioned earlier that Dune is a very political story that deals with the power systems of the universe, and the endgame for Dune Awakening will actually touch more on that given how players will be able to compete for control of Arrakis with other players – directly influencing the map and different power structures of that map on a particular server. How was it concepting that type of endgame experience?

Yeah, interacting with Dune's political structure is the fun part. While Dune's Landstradd is obviously too big for someone like the player to control, the exciting thing about politics is you don't necessarily need to be in control of something to influence it. I mean, we can look at real-life politics to see that if you're a strong proponent of something, you can talk to other like-minded people and do whatever you need to do to convince them to make positively influenced decisions. That's what the end-game politics of Dune Awakening is all about.

These decisions you and your allies make help you, but they are not entirely great for other players, and that's a fun dynamic to deal with in an online game. Dune has always been a political IP, and how do you get politics to be interesting within a game like this? Well, you got to involve other people, right? So, by making it on an online game, you get that chance because now we're all vying for supremacy over Arrakis. As for me, I'll make decisions, and I want to help other players, but other people don't want to. Suddenly, we have to sacrifice each other's efforts to come out on top.

Dune Awakening

And that endgame also opens up some deeper PvP modes as well. How was it coming up with the systems for how PvP works?

Yeah, so the desert is really massive, and there are zones where you can play solo and cooperatively or against other players and factions. We have the Deep Desert zone, where the more hardcore PvP occurs. You would go there to get large quantities of resources, such as spice. Collaboration can be very important to thrive in those areas, and you will need to transport sand crawlers to collect resources. Because it's PvP, people can raid and take all the resources you've been trying to collect, and you'll need some help to stay safe and safely leave the zone to bring your gear back to your base. It's a whole logistical chain that you and your friends will have to collaborate on to make it all work. Then, you also factor in Coriolis Storms that disrupt the map, which can send sand everywhere and bury things but could potentially unearth things elsewhere for something exciting.

There are many ways to protect and prepare your bases and guild for the activities. It gives us a really cool system for showing new content regularly. The players are so smart about what resources and gear they build right now. So we think it will be a really fun experience once it's fully up and running – that's where we expect a lot of the end-game action to take place.

Even though the game is still coming together now, and more people are getting access through betas, what's something about Dune: Awakening that really stands out for you as of now?

We've made many really cool decisions with this game, some of which I'm frustrated to say that I can't talk about yet when it comes to the story, but I can talk about our choice to go with an alternate history and how we developed that. I'm very proud of the team for coming up with those details, and I think it sets us in a situation where we can really respect the lore and the story of the books while making a game experience that is actually enjoyable. I'm very excited for more players to be able to get their hands on the game. I'm pretty proud of what we've made so far.