At GDC 2024, Wccftech attended a presentation and subsequent roundtable Q&A about open world survival MMO Dune Awakening with Creative Director Joel Bylos. The full interview will be available soon, but in the meantime, here’s what Bylos told us when we asked whether the game would launch this year:
The best question. I would love to know. I don’t know. We don’t want to ship it till it’s ready. I don’t know how many of you have played Conan Exiles. We have a reputation for interesting ideas and some jank. I would prefer to get rid of the jank. I’d like to launch a game that’s really polished from Funcom. We’ve grown as a company. I think we can deliver a really polished survival experience. It’s a big IP. It’s really hot right now. When we took the IP in 2019, we just knew there’d be a film.
We didn’t know it was gonna be the films that they are right now. It’s blown up into something gigantic. That puts more pressure on us, and obviously, we feel that pressure. So, I want to make sure the game can fulfill the fantasies of Dune fans.
Clearly, the stakes are higher than ever for Funcom. The developer, now owned by Tencent, has had a larger budget at its disposal to make Dune Awakening and understandably, they’d want to release a more polished experience than their usual rough gems.
It does seem like they may be on the right path. The GDC 2024 presentation started with the very beginning of the game, which is highly reminiscent of the first Dune movie when the Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit tests Paul. After customizing their character’s look, players will also pick their background (including which planet they’re from, for example) and make other choices that will influence a dialogue trait available to them.
Shortly after that, the ship used by the player character is immediately shot down, forcing players to survive in the harsh environment of Arrakis. However, Dune Awakening features a tutorial area to ease players in their journey while they craft basic survival tools like a knife and heal kits, as well as harvesting plant fiber. The free climbing system of Conan Exiles returns here with new features like Suspensor belts and the Shigawire grappling hook.
After the tutorial, players will need to beware when walking on open sand as it could lure sandworms, and also stay in the shade to avoid sunstrokes, which cause the water level to drop much more quickly. It is possible to drink water from plants, but Bylos warned not to ingest too much plant fiber in the process, otherwise there might be drawbacks.
Players can harvest salvage metal and use their cutter to identify structural weak points in the debris in a minigame-like fashion. Later on, they’ll be able to upgrade their tools to mine harder minerals and eventually don the iconic stillsuits that allow them to store water. After crafting the aforementioned Suspensor belt, players can glide from high points and even preserve momentum for higher jumps, which the developers hope will make for interesting traversal experiences. The game also features a free climbing system, enabling players to climb any surface.
Of course, Dune Awakening will feature plenty of combat. The presentation demonstrated two types of characters: Trooper and Mentat. The Trooper character uses a spring-powered pistol, the Shigawire grappling hook, and a standard grenade, while the Mentat is a human with computer-like abilities who can identify enemy information at range thanks to the Battlefield Calculation skill. This character also uses a Hunter Seeker drone to one-shot enemies. The caveat is that Hunter Seekers can only see enemies moving, so stationary enemies will be invisible to the drones. The same tactics can be employed in PvP, of course.
Water will be absolutely critical in the game. Players can harvest it directly from the enemies’ blood (including those of other players in PvP) or refine it first using a water purifier. The latter is much preferable as the former also comes with a massive rebuff to your max health, but it may be your only option in certain situations.
Dune Awakening also has an extensive building system which is largely based on Conan Exiles. However, this game will encourage cooperative group play when building bases. For instance, you may activate a hologram of the structure you’re interested in building and then a fellow friend can add the resources to make it happen. Funcom also introduced a tool that allows players to copy and rebuild structures, which is essential for the game’s deep desert PvP map where everything will be regularly swept away by Coriolis storms.
Bases can be equipped with various crafting machines, such as the blood purifier mentioned above, and players can spend points in the technology menu to buy schematics. All of the vehicles in the game are made up of different components, and players can customize them with various elements. A sandbike could have a faster engine, a more efficient engine, a seat in the back, et cetera. Bylos also stressed the importance of discovering unique schematics in the world, which can be sold to other players at high prices.
As you would expect given the genre, there will be world events, such as damaged spaceships crashing down that can be harvested for unique resources. When nighttime comes, Sardaukar ships might also be looking for escaped prisoners from above, causing players to hide from their searchlights.By the way, the sandworm is meant to be a constant threat in the game. It cannot be outrun or defeated, and players must avoid it by reaching the safety of rocky ground.
The MMO-like portion of the game features connected servers with social spaces like villages, where players can interact with each other and find trainers, merchants, guilds, and factions. Speaking of character progression, Bylos said players can take skills from a variety of trees, from Bene Gesserit all the way to planetologist. The character build includes three active abilities and three passive techniques. These will be particularly important when exploring the ecology labs, which function as dungeons with unique experiments and challenges.
Of course, spice is the game’s backbone, as it should be for a Dune adaptation. Players will need it for various activities and can obtain the resource by harvesting it in the desert. They can work together to efficiently gather spice using transport ornithopters and sandcrawlers. You’ll need the former to transport the latter to wherever spice needs to be gathered; attempting to move a sandcrawler manually to that location will only draw the sandworm due to the slow speed of these vehicles. Moreover, players will always have to be mindful of the arrival of sandstorms that can destroy vehicles and sweep away the precious spice. They must decide how long to stay on a spice blow before the sandstorm arrives and whether to risk waiting it out or returning to base.
Notably, in Dune Awakening, the spice will be violet when it blows up in the air before turning orange-brown when it oxidizes. Funcom got the green light from the Herberts to make this change.
The open world survival MMO is in development with Unreal Engine 5.2 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. Beta signups are still available on the official website.
