Today, Funcom released its second Dune: Awakening Direct, where Game Director Joel Bylos revealed more details of the upcoming survival MMO.
To start with, we learned that following the previous limited Closed Beta events, Dune: Awakening has recently entered the persistent Closed Beta phase, which is obviously a step toward the full release, allowing testers to check out the whole game. There’s still no word on the launch, although Funcom has already promised an ‘epic’ gameplay reveal at Gamescom, and that might be the venue for such announcements.
Throughout the Dune: Awakening Direct, the studio showed the character creation tool, where players choose not only how their character looks but also their background, including their mentor’s specialization, such as Mentat, Bene Gesserit, Trooper, and Swordmaster.
However, the juiciest part of the video was the overview of the world structure. Funcom explained that there is a top-down Overland map connecting the various huge maps, one of which supports hundreds of players at once. This choice allows the studio to expand the game more easily in the future with additional playable spaces than it could have with a single map. If you’re interested in the full breakdown of how the MMO component of Dune: Awakening works, here’s the excerpt from Bylos.
When players start to play Dune: Awakening, they choose a world. It’s almost like choosing a server in an MMORPG, but it’s a large infrastructure of connected servers. The idea is that as a player, you choose, you join, you start in a map, and from there, your experience should be relatively seamless in terms of how you explore and feel the world.
The reason we call it a survival MMO, as opposed to just a survival game, is that most survival games do one map, one server. But we have multiple connected servers running in a single world, and it also allows us to have a lot more players in this structure.
When you join the game, you start in the Hagga Basin map, which has a server with a minimum of 40 other players. It’s a place where you can build, craft, survive, progress. If you want to play specifically with friends, you want to join the same version of Hagga Basin because it can have multiple versions. And then from there, you move outwards.
I can select which Hagga Basin I’m starting with. So if we start in Dune: Awakening at the same time, I can make sure that we’re spawning in the same. Not only that, our server browser also tells you where your friends are playing. Once you’re ready to leave the Hagga Basin, you craft yourself an ornithopter and you fly out into what’s called the Overland map, which allows you to see all the locations in the world. You physically fly between locations on the Overland map.
One of those options are the social hubs, Harko Village and Arrakeen, which are differently themed based on the different factions in the game. These are safe spaces, peaceful by the Canley Peace. There are bars, vendors, and home exchanges. And of course, you and your friends can go dancing in the clubs.
Then you’ll go back to the Overland map and you’ll fly to the Deep Desert. The Deep Desert is this massive area, a minimum of 500 square kilometers. It’s actually a bit larger than that. That’s where you can meet hundreds of other players in Dune: Awakening. There is probably going to be a player cap if too many people go there, but it should be able to handle quite a lot of people, and that’s a completely seamless set of servers that are all connected together.
It’s generally a PVP map with a strip of PVE as people enter so that they can be safe when they come into the map and don’t get ganked. The cool thing about the Deep Desert map is that we have this thing called the Coriolis Storm, which every week wipes the Deep Desert and sets it with a new landscape and new points of interest, so it’s an infinitely explorable space and a really cool place to hang with your friends.
Despite the lack of a release window, Dune: Awakening remains on our radar as one of the most promising multiplayer games. It will launch on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X, though we don’t know yet if it’ll support cross-play.
