Interview: Dune Awakening Dev Explains How They Tackled The Immense Lore To Craft A New Online Survival Game

With Dune: Awakening, we're finally getting a game to explore, survive, and hopefully thrive on the desert planet of Arrakis. Though Frank Herbert's Dune has seen its fair share of game adaptations, Funcom's upcoming online open-world survival game is the first to let players explore the dangerous planet at their own leisure – all while navigating its treacherous political landscape and avoiding some sandworms.

While at Tokyo Game Show 2024, I played the opening hour of Dune: Awakening's survival experience, where I learned the ins and outs of staying alive on Arrakis by finding scraps of resources and taking out raiders for their gear. I also spoke with game producer Nils Ryborg about making the first open-world game within the Dune universe and why an online survival game was the way to go.

When you look back on the Dune games, they've mostly focused on the strategy genre along with a few adventures games as well. What's interesting about Dune Awakening is that it's the first open-world game for this franchise. How has been diving into that universe to build out a game like this?

It's been a fun and interesting challenge trying to dive deeper into that universe. As you mentioned, previous Dune games have mostly focused on grand strategy. So, of course, we pull a lot from the books, but we found that many of the details within them tend to be very macro-based – like they have big stories that focus on what happens between the planets on a huge political scale. So, we've had to do a ton of research to figure out more about what things are like on a lower level for the average characters to incorporate that into the ground-level survival experience. When you interact with characters in the game, you'll be able to see a bit more of a human experience and what things are like for them specifically.

That's what we're very excited about, really getting to show the diversity of life in Arrakis. Within films or books, you often see one big desert, but Frank Herbert was