Dune: Awakening Unveils MMO Structure and Overland Map, Confirms Persistent Closed Beta Is Now Ongoing

Today, Funcom released its second Dune: Awakening Direct, where Game Director Joel Bylos revealed more details of the upcoming survival MMO.

To start with, we learned that following the previous limited Closed Beta events, Dune: Awakening has recently entered the persistent Closed Beta phase, which is obviously a step toward the full release, allowing testers to check out the whole game. There's still no word on the launch, although Funcom has already promised an 'epic' gameplay reveal at Gamescom, and that might be the venue for such announcements.

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

Throughout the Dune: Awakening Direct, the studio showed the character creation tool, where players choose not only how their character looks but also their background, including their mentor's specialization, such as Mentat, Bene Gesserit, Trooper, and Swordmaster.

However, the juiciest part of the video was the overview of the world structure. Funcom explained that there is a top-down Overland map connecting the various huge maps, one of which supports hundreds of players at once. This choice allows the studio to expand the game more easily in the future with additional playable spaces than it could have with a single map. If you're interested in the full breakdown of how the MMO component of Dune: Awakening works, here's the excerpt from Bylos.

When players start to play Dune: Awakening, they choose a world. It's almost like choosing a server in an MMORPG, but it's a large infrastructure of connected servers. The idea is that as a player, you choose, you join, you start in a map, and from there, your experience should be relatively seamless in terms of how you explore and feel the world.

The reason we call it a survival MMO, as opposed to just a survival game, is that most survival games do one map, one server. But we have multiple connected servers running in a single world, and it also allows us to have a lot more players