Emerging from an identity crisis, Dune: Awakening developer Funcom concluded last month that the game is "not an MMO" but rather a "complicated" survival game with online play. The big announcement out of Tuesday's PlayStation State of Play show – not God of War Laufey, the Dune news – leans into this not-an-MMO future, with a single-player mode coming to the game in September.
On September 22, Dune: Awakening will launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X, with single-player coming the same day, and the final act of the book one story dropping as well.
"This will be the best version of Dune: Awakening yet," Funcom insists in a Steam post. "Not just a great Open World Survival game, but the ultimate gateway into one of science fiction’s most iconic worlds." I like to think "Open World Survival" game is in title case to deepen the line in the sand. This ain't no MMO, buddy. This is an OWS.
Single-player will be an option when you first start Dune: Awakening, the devs explain, letting you "finally experience the entire game in single-player mode, across all platforms, and play it entirely at your own pace."
This solo mode will offer three preset difficulty settings as well as "full manual customization" for things like XP, enemy strength, and harvest speed. "All the NPCs are here, but no other players," Funcom adds.
"The Deep Desert is fully available with all its content and challenges, but the map never resets and your buildings are never wiped," the devs say, and I know that will be music to some players' ears. "The Coriolis Storm remains as a weather event but is less destructive. The Landsraad endgame simulates other players engaging with the faction conflict, keeping it competitive and engaging."
How does this new mode fit into the updated Dune ecosystem? "We're putting characters – not servers – at the center of the experience," Funcom says. Single-player characters will "remain exclusive to the single-player mode," but private and self-hosted server characters "can be played on any of these and can even go between private and self-hosted servers."
Characters made on official servers will be able to go between any official server, and can move to private or self-hosted servers, but can't then go back to official servers "to ensure the integrity of official servers."
A lot of true-blue MMOs are playable solo in some capacity, with the clearest example probably being Ironman accounts in Old School RuneScape, which, by design, can't trade or really interact with other players. You can also put your head down and just focus on story quests almost entirely solo in the likes of Final Fantasy 14, which has even made solo play easier by beefing up NPC allies who can streamline multiplayer dungeons and the like.
But the clue's in the name: MMOs aren't single-player experiences, so adding a single-player mode is about as loud a declaration as Dune: Awakening could make. This ain't no MMO, buddy, etc, etc.
"Single-player is one of the most-requested features since launch," Funcom says. "We’re also adding the final chapter of Dune: Awakening’s Book One story, so whether you want to play entirely by yourself, with friends on a private server, or with strangers on a larger multiplayer server, you will now be able to play the story from the start to its dramatic conclusion."
The demand for solo play is interesting on its own. It reflects the muddier definition of what Dune: Awakening really is, and the audience it attracted. People generally don't come to an MMO to play alone, but survival games – that is, the more conventional ones – do have a huge single-player audience. Multiplayer is also baked into a lot of survival games – from Rust to Palworld to Valheim, with the likes of Don't Starve Together and now Subnautica 2 explicitly emphasizing it – but it's not as essential to the genre.
Everything announced at the PlayStation State of Play June 2026.
