Summary
- Developers at Funcom prioritize accuracy in Dune lore & benefit from Legendary’s support.
- Dune: Awakening will incorporate unique elements from Lynch’s film while emphasizing city locations over deserts.
- The game aims to stand out in the survival genre by offering complex tasks, evolving storylines, and diverse gameplay.
Not many sci-fi series have lore as complex as Dune. From a series of books in the ’60s to modern masterpiece movies, the Dune world features a lot of established ideas that could confuse you.
That existing lore, and the attention to detail of die-hard fans, was something the developers at Funcom constantly had at the front of their minds while developing Dune: Awakening. I spoke to Gavin Whelan, the studio’s Senior Art Director, about working with an existing IP and what the future holds for the upcoming game.
Working With The Dune IP
“Working on movie licenses is problematic. I’ve worked with movie licenses in the past, and it’s always hard to get information from the production team,” Whelan told me. However, he said that Legendary has been “very good at keeping a connection with us. Feeding us information, giving us concepts, giving us production designs, all the way through to talking to the cinematographer, Greg Fraser. He’s a fantastic guy, really easy to talk to once I got past my fear of who he is, a double Oscar winner.”
However, the Dune world isn’t just the modern films. There’s the saga of books Funcom has primarly worked from, previous Dune strategy games, and the movie directed by the late David Lynch. With so much lore, it’s been a challenge for Funcom to ensure no mistakes make their way into the game. Helpfully, “Joel [Bylos, Dune: Awakening’s Creative Director] knows everything,” Whelan says. “He knows the books inside and out, so you cannot get things past him because he sits right behind me, so he will catch things.”
The Impact Of David Lynch’s Adaptation
And Lynch’s strange film isn’t being ignored either. “Lynch tried to grapple [with] a lot of the strange weirdness of the license, which is something which we don’t want to ignore, we don’t want to forget. That’s part of the uniqueness of the world, and it’s something we just want to keep on adding. And I keep telling the rest of the artists working on this, this is an opportunity that doesn’t come around very often, to work on something this unique.”
While Lynch’s film is distinct for how it explores the Dune universe, there’s only so much desert players will want to explore. Whelan said his team thrived on developing the city locations that break out the rolling dunes of Arrakis. “[Developing cities] was significantly easier than making sand interesting, other than just changing the colour of the sand. The faction identity was brilliant to work on, because, like I said, they’re unique.”
“How do we take something that’s 40,000, 50,000, 100,000, years into the future, a feudalistic system, and make it feel ancient and modern at the same time? I think it’s a great challenge, a great opportunity to do that. Thinking about what spaceship design looked like for these people. It can’t be Star Wars, it can’t be cliched sci-fi. It has to be unique. It has to be different. And there are no aliens. They’re all humans, but they’ve just been separated by time and space, and they develop very separate approaches to things.”
Making Dune: Awakening Stand Out
Those attempts to make Dune: Awakening stand out among sci-fi survival games comes down to even the menial tasks.
It is “one of the challenges with regular sandbox survival games,” Whelan said. “You know, you rub sticks together to make fire. You cut down a tree for a stack of logs. It’s a very organic, understandable, relatable thing. In this universe, we just don’t have that. And we’re not underestimating the intelligence of our players. They can figure this stuff out. They know that there are technologies that are available to them.”
Then, as you progress, things start to “elevate more into a story and become connected to the wider story and the wider story arcs. Players will develop their own storylines that will integrate and form larger clans, larger groupings, and drive things in the deep desert gameplay, where you want them to sort of create their own storylines, but there still is that big overlap in story that players will interact with.”
Thankfully, Dune: Awakening has enough to attract even survival game sceptics. “I think so. I hope so,” Whelan said when I asked if the third-person shooting and multiplayer aspects are enough to entice fans of those genres.
Expanding on that, he said, “I know lots of people who love vehicles and vehicle sim games. Okay, it’s a lot easier and more straightforward, but it’s still fun. The base level, just getting on a sand bike and driving around, is fun. Flying Ornithopters is fun. Yeah, combat will come…It will be fun and engaging. These are the things which people will gravitate to and this is something we picked up on with Conan Exiles. People make it their own.”
What Dune: Awakening’s Future Holds
Beyond that variety and the hundreds of hours of content expected in the base game, I was interested to hear where Funcom sees Awakening going in the future. Conan Exiles has been active since 2017 and gets large updates to this day.
When talking about future plans, “you can go places,” Whelan said vaguely. “There’s nothing really stopping us from doing that. There’s nothing technically stopping us from going to other planets in the future. It’s such a wide universe that they’ve created. I just want to work on a place with trees, so there’s no end to what we can do. It’s great. It’s a great license for that.”
It’s exciting to hear that Funcom already has ideas for the future of Dune: Awakening. Working with such an established IP is exciting and limited, but Dune has plenty of variety to keep players coming back for years.
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