The spice must flow, including in updates for Dune: Awakening. The Arrakis-set MMO is getting a single-player mode soon, and it'll provide more options for how much you want to get out of the experience compared to the more live-service way of playing.
At Camescom 2026, Joel Bylos, the chief creative office of developer Funcom, explained the logic to GamesRadar+. "The good thing about single-player is with the way that you can play the story and get into the story, you don't have to spend that 100 hours, right?" he says.
"You can get through the game in 50, maybe 80 hours if you change some of the settings and make it easier for yourself," he adds.
This is the thing - playing the single-player mode lets you curate the difficulty and other aspects to far greater depth than if you were partaking in the MMO side of things. Funcom handles a lot of that, because it needs to work as intended for a huge community, and there are expectations for events and the like.
"The multiplayer aspects of the game, where we built out this end game, I think people are complaining that it's a little too grindy, so we're going to work on some of that," Byblos comments. "In single-player, you can just change all of those settings yourself. So you have full control over the experience in single-player. Multiplayer, on the other hand, we control the experience a little more."
He mentions the devs are looking into updates to make it a little better for people," but to him, at least, "100 hours isn't bad" for how much people can get out of the project. That's definitely a good chunk of time, and a strong base for a game that's only been out just over a year.
Dune: Awakening has struggled a bit to retain players since launching in early access, but having more options for how people can join in should help remedy that. I know I'm more likely to get involved if I can turn off the live-service mechanics. Whether or not I get 100 hours out of it remains to be seen, all depends on how fond of the spice I become.
