by theygamesDune Awakening is on the horizon, finally bringing the Arrakean survival fantasy to life, but why has it taken so long? Frank Herbert’s iconic sci-fi odyssey presents the perfect environment for a survival game. Everything about Arrakis is death upon death, wrapped in death with a side helping of, well, death.
Dune has traditionally been synonymous with strategy games, its focus on resource management and playing politics making for some of the most innovative games to come out of the ’90s. The closest we got to a full-fledged 3D survival adventure on Arrakis was 2001’s ‘Frank Herbert’s Dune,’ which anyone old enough to have unfortunately played it will tell you was quite awful.
After twenty years and a couple of canned Dune projects, 4X RTS Dune Spice Wars (published, coincidentally, by Funcom) entered early access, and it seemed that the videogame wing of the series would forever be tied to the genre. Months later, however, Dune Awakening was revealed – a survival MMO on my Desert? My Arrakis? My Dune? Sacrilege.
But, as I said, Dune is the perfect setting for a survival game. Between the burning heat, scarcity of water, and those teeny tiny sandworms burrowing about the place, among other threats, it’s wild to think that it’s taken so long for this sort of experience to materialize. Rather than guzzling down the water of life in the hopes of understanding why (and probably dying in the process), I put the question to Dune Awakening producer Nils Ryborg.
“It’s funny, right?” Ryborg begins. “[Survival] fits very naturally when you look at it. Dune is so focused on politics, so I understand the natural instinct to go somewhere political where strategy games would go.”
Before being greenlit by Legendary Pictures to make Dune Awakening, Funcom had been pouring its developmental energy into another survival experience in Conan Exiles – something that Ryborg hints had an influence on the studio’s direction.
“We’ve worked with survival games so it’s a genre we’re very comfortable with and we enjoy working within, so when we got the opportunity to work with the IP, we saw the natural fit and found it very exciting. It’s a different way of thinking about it – you don’t see some things because you’re not looking at them with the right eyes. There’s a saying about the person with a hammer who sees every problem as a nail. For people developing survival games it’s like, ‘yeah, obviously, this is a survival game,’ but when you’re thinking about something completely different it’s very easy to miss.”
With the Dune strategy mold smashed, all we can do is wait to see if Funcom can nail the execution. My new Dune Awakening preview for the site will give you a better feel for where the game’s currently at, and I’m quietly confident that it’s going to be a thumping good time – provided it doesn’t summon Shai-Hulud.
In other Dune Awakening news, peep the 1,000s-strong closed playtest Funcom’s been not-so-sneakily conducting. With the Dune Awakening release date still unconfirmed, steam towards a big launch reveal or even open beta could finally be gathering.
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