Dune Awakening Q&A – Creative Director Clarifies MMO Size, Hints at Beyond Arrakis

During the Game Developers Conference 2024 in San Francisco, Funcom provided the first detailed Dune Awakening presentation to the press. For the full details of what was discussed in the open world survival MMO's overview, head to our previous article.

Here, we'll focus on the subsequent roundtable Q&A with Dune Awakening Creative Director Joel Bylos. A 17-year veteran of the Norwegian studio who is credited for working on games like Age of Conan, The Secret World, The Park, Conan Exiles, Conan: Unconquered, and even Metal: Hellsinger, Bylos was all too happy to indulge the many questions posed to him about the upcoming Unreal Engine 5 powered game (currently in beta testing).

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Do you have to be a female character to play a Bene Gesserit?

No. The idea is that you aren't becoming a member of the Bene Gesserit, you've just been trained by people who know how to train in the ways of the Bene Gesserit. There's a couple of examples of this in the books and of course, in the movie as well, when Paul is obviously trained by his mother. We have these examples of men picking up some of the traits as well, as long as they don't become official Bene Gesserit. That's how we are playing it in the game as well.

WCCFTECH: There's the idea among some gamers that Dune: Awakening will just be a regular survival game rather than a survival MMO. You claimed the latter from the beginning, and the Steam page even mentioned thousands of players at the same time, but that's since been removed. Can you clarify how the servers work and how many players will be online on a server at any one time?

Sure. It's different maps. The reason we removed thousands of players at one time was that our optimization was not saying 1000 at the same time. So we were like, ok, that's misleading. It's hundreds at the very least, and right now I would say so.

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