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As Funcom continues its work on Dune: Awakening, the survival-meets-MMO adaptation of sci-fi icon Frank Herbert's nearly 60-year-old universe, I sat down with producer Nils Ryborg to discuss the studio's unique game. With genre gems like Conan Exiles already up its sleeve, I've never doubted the team's ability to develop survival bangers – but I've always wondered what stepping into the MMO sphere means for Funcom.
Is Dune: Awakening akin to Final Fantasy 14 or World of Warcraft? Is it entirely multiplayer or is it enjoyable as a single-player experience within an online game? I ask Ryborg this, who responds with exactly what I was hoping to hear – how someone plays is entirely up to them. "The main story is very much a single-player experience. You're playing in the multiplayer world, obviously, but it's something that you kind of drive and do on your own."
"We've got more story content apart from just the main story, with factions that you can try and align yourself with, training that you do for specific disciplines, and so on," he continues. "But apart from just the story, [there's] just building bases and the like. I'm a big fan of building and decorating and things like that. I think it's really fun. That is absolutely something you can do, both solo but also co-op."
You can also enjoy Dune: Awakening with a close friend or two, "collaborate and build your own thing and just hang out and enjoy the survival mechanics for what they are," rather than pair up with strangers. The only time you absolutely have to lock into any more multiplayer-aligned gameplay is for the MMO's "endgame" or so-called "hardcore" content.
"A lot of the endgame loops are strongly multiplayer," says Ryborg. "So if you really want to kind of engage with things like the political endgame or the big spice harvesting operations, then you obviously need a lot of people – but you can still engage with and enjoy a lot of the other mechanics entirely single-player if that's your preference." As someone who doesn't always enjoy MMOs' more social features, I breathe a sigh of relief.
A whole new (but still sandy) world
When it comes to Dune: Awakening's less MMO-inclined mechanics, Ryborg says that the studio's experience producing Conan Exiles has been a boon. "We've been making jokes about it internally," laughs the dev, "but we started out making the oldest sand tech for Conan because we started in the desert. Now we're just upgrading it here for Dune because we're back in the desert, right? But even apart from that, we're quite familiar with general survival mechanics. And with Dune, we've had the pleasure of being able to upgrade the quality of it. So in Conan, it's very focused on food, of course, because that's the normal kind of go-to survival mechanic."
However, Arrakis is anything but normal. "Here we have an IP where food is, of course, a thing, but it's really not the most interesting focus," explains Ryborg. "Water is the most important thing on Arrakis apart from spice, so building our survival mechanics around the water and water retention instead has been really exciting." Water isn't the only way in which Awakening strays from genre predecessors, though – Funcom is evolving survival in other ways, too.
"Things like shadow play, having to hide from the sun and thinking about that, and being able to harvest water best at night, and things of this nature have allowed us to take not only our experience and kind of use it but also to evolve it into something that's more interesting and more fitting to the IP," reveals Ryborg. "So yes, absolutely, we do feel it. We're well positioned to make a strong survival game because of experience, but it's also fun to be allowed to evolve it with the help of a new IP."
With hundreds of hours in other survival games, I'm particularly interested by the other mechanics or systems that might set Dune: Awakening apart from titles like Conan Exiles. He tells me about the MMO's mind-boggling shield feature – one that hardened Dune stans are sure to enjoy. Shields aren't a force that can be whittled away over time, but impenetrable defenses that players can only break through via the slow use of a dagger.
Ryborg also mentions sandstorms, but the strangest thing in Dune: Awakening will almost certainly be its spice – "the most important thing in the entire universe." and "also something that you're going to use to fuel your own ability." That's right – spice can be used to enhance players' abilities, but its use comes with a catch.
"If you want to be able to use [abilities] at your absolute peak, you're going to need some spice," says Ryborg. "But if you keep taking spice all the time, you're going to start getting addicted, then you start needing to deal with addiction symptoms." It's yet another way Dune: Awakening tries to stay true to Herbert's lore, and its devs love it. "Finding ways of taking things that are classically Dune and turning them into gameplay mechanics has been really exciting."
A tale (not quite) as old as time
"We're not making the movies, we're making our own version based on the books"
Funcom isn't able to recreate Herbert's universe word-for-word, however, and that's largely due to Denis Villeneuve's 2021 and 2024 film adaptations. Dune: Awakening follows an "alternate timeline" of sorts, but this has allowed devs a sense of creative freedom they might not have otherwise had. As Ryborg puts it, "The alternate timeline really changed a lot of things and made it a lot easier to work with."
With the different storyline, which sees Paul of House Atreides never born, Ryborg says the studio had "a lot of cool things we were able to do thanks to the alt timeline." Paul being absent means other characters who were killed off are alive in-game. "These are really cool, iconic characters we still want to be able to see, right? And so our little changes to just that little bit, Paul not being here, lets us keep all these characters around – lets you interact with them directly."
Duke Leto, Duncan, the Baron – all of them. "You get to speak with them, interact with them, help them, harm them – depending on how you want to play the game," says Ryborg. "And that's been super exciting for us to be allowed to work with so I would say [the alt timeline] really just helped. It's given us a ton of creative freedom." This freedom doesn't see devs straying too far from the source material, though, which Ryborg jokes the leads treat "like a bible."
Circling back to Dune's more recent film adaptations, I ask the producer how their popularity has affected Awakening's development. Ryborg tells me the movies are "absolutely helping" production. "It's fantastic to see the films kind of come to life, and then note you are working on that very same IP. And you know, we got our own little sneak peeks of things in advance, which has helped us kind of maintain some of the visual language from the movies."
Villeneuve's films were still in pre-production when Funcom started its work on Awakening, "so there will be deviants between the two of them" – especially as Ryborg states "we're not making the movies, we're making our own version based on the books primarily but with a lot of inspiration from the great work [Villeneuve] and his team did." As for any challenges presented by the films, Ryborg points to the necessity for an alternate timeline but asserts once more that it hasn't been all bad.
Aside from the "freedom" provided by the rewritten story, the dev admits that "normally people step on each other's toes a lot" in similar situations with simultaneous adaptations – but Funcom hasn't had to worry about doing so with its own version of Herbert's lore. It helps that "the IP holders have been super cooperative and really helpful in making sure we get all the info we need," too.
"A game with its own identity"
"[It's] a game with its own identity, and I think it stands up very well"
As a longtime fan of both Herbert's books and now Villeneuve's films, I'm now even more curious about Dune: Awakening's identity as a game and how it stands out in either the survival or MMO genre. It has its unique mechanics and quirks like the lore-friendly shield system, sure, but is there anything else that makes Funcom's new title shine? "So many things," according to Ryborg. From its fantastical side to its attention to Dune's setting, many factors help set Awakening apart – its "sheer size" included.
"There's a lot of world to cover. The multiplayer aspect, letting you see how other people build, getting to ruin their spice race and get your own in, or be collaborative and build your bases and raid eco labs together, and things of that nature," says Ryborg. "[It's] a game with its own identity, and I think it stands up very well."
How will this one-of-a-kind identity evolve after launch, though? I wonder this aloud, asking Ryborg what evolutionary direction Dune: Awakening might take. "The world is very big," he tells me, "so there are definitely opportunities even beyond Arrakis. I cannot confirm or deny anything beyond that, but it's a big universe, and we want to showcase a lot. We've made choices already on Arrakis to try and help bring this up."
Could this mean expansions or trips to other planets? Only time can truly tell, but Ryborg assures me that we'll "get to see a lot of Dune in the future" as Funcom still has "a lot of cool ideas". They're ideas I'm keen to see play out, and by the time our interview wraps up, I'm itching to sink into the unforgiving sands of Arrakis right now – dehydration, sandworms, and Sardaukar ships be damned.
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