Funcom Chief Creative Officer and the Creative Director for Dune: Awakening Joel Bylos confirmed the game will “sidestep religion.”
A screenshot from Dune: Awakening (TBA), Funcom
In an interview with Eurogamer, Bylos revealed that the game is taking liberties with Frank Herbert’s book stating, “Things are slightly different in our universe. Many events are still the same, so it’s not like we’ve gone all ‘thousands of years ago, a rock slid in the wrong place and changed everything’. It’s just a few years back.”
He then revealed the company is sidestepping religion, “But the significant thing – it’s really close to spoiler territory, which I can’t really go through – but let’s just say that for the large part, we sort of sidestep religion.”
A screenshot from Dune: Awakening (TBA), Funcom
Herbert made it abundantly clear as anyone who has read the book knows, religion is one of the key elements in Dune.
In an interview with Willis McNelly about Dune and Dune Messiah in February 1969, Herbert said, “I started accumulating these file folders, which I’ll show you later, and as a result, I finally saw that I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was, for a science fiction writer anyway, it was an easy step from that to think: What if I had an entire planet that was a desert? During my studies of deserts, of course, and previous studies of religions, we all know that many religions began in a desert atmosphere, so I decided to put the two together because I don’t think that any one story should have any one thread. I build on a layer technique, and of course putting in religion and religious ideas you can play one against the other.”
Later, he discussed the religious construct of Paul as an avatar or a new messiah, “Well, one of the threads in the story is to trace a possible way a messiah is created in our society, and I hope I was successful in making it believable. Here we have the entire process, or at least the large and some of the subtle elements of the construction of this, both from the individual standpoint, and from the way society demands this of you. It’s the references in there, you know, that the man must recognize the myth he is living in, because the creation of an avatar is a mythmaking process. We’ve done it in our…in recent times. Look at what’s happening to John F. Kennedy.”
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As for how he and Funcom approached the game, Bylos shared, “I found a point in the universe – like it was a really fun thing to go back to the Herberts and be like, ‘Hey, if we say this happened in our universe, and then this is the flow of consequences from that, so at this point, things changed, are you okay with that?’ Because then I can kind of position everything for a video game, and they were like, ‘Yeah, actually that’s great’, and then you’re not stepping on the lore.”
Bylos also shared that there is a “very spiritual set of things that happen to the player in the game as they take spice.”
A screenshot from Dune: Awakening (TBA), Funcom
The collecting of spice is at the core of the game. Bylos explained, “Spice is kind of at the core of everything we do – that’s why you go to the deep desert, you’re fighting over the big spice blows, trying to harvest it.”
He also asserted that it’s “key to the economy of the game.”
Furthermore, he added, “But also as an individual player, when you take spice it’ll mutate some of the abilities you have, and they do different things – you’re also guided to things… maybe spice dreams towards the single player story and how that can work. And the more spice you take, the more addicted to spice it becomes, the more spice you need.”
He also shared, “One of the things I think the movies don’t do enough of is the weirdness of Dune – and we are definitely trying to capture some of that in the game. So spice plays a bigger part, and I think the player’s interactions with spice can be pretty fucking interesting, so that’s cool.”
A screenshot from Dune: Awakening (TBA), Funcom
Bylos went on to predict the game would be criticized by those who don’t finish the story, “I think we’re gonna get probably, you know, early criticism from people who haven’t finished the story – because they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh, it’s another chosen one story,’ and then I think they’re gonna find out that they’re wrong.
When asked if Paul Atreides would be in the game, Bylos said, “No comment.”
A screenshot from Dune: Awakening (TBA), Funcom
As for how the game plays, Bylos explained in a video on the Game Clips and Tips YouTube channel, “Dune: Awakening is a survival game at the base level. And it begins like a traditional survival game: you’re looking for water, you’re looking for shelter. You know, where will you find water in the desert? Will you take it from others?”
He elaborated, “So when we talk about survival, sure, we start with the basic kind of survival: survive. And then when you survive long enough it’s now time to think about political survival and how you progress within the universe.”
As for the political survival, Bylos informed Eurogamer, “I think the one of the major things that we’re doing with the politics is that the factions themselves are like, highly mired in the politics. So the objectives aren’t always guild based. They’re faction based, right? So it doesn’t matter if there’s 50 guilds on the Harkonnen side, those 50 guilds are working towards the same objectives.”
The two factions are currently the Atreides and Harkonnens, but Bylos wants to add a third, “There’s a third faction that’d like to get in but that probably won’t come until post-launch.”
A screenshot from Dune: Awakening (TBA), Funcom
Bylos also revealed the game is heavily influenced by Denis Villeneuve’s vision of Dune. He shared, “We’ve been working with Legendary since the very beginning. They’ve been very generous with sharing with us assets from the film and allowing us to see things from the film and allowing us to really understand the vision that Denis Villeneuve has for the world and his characters and the way he’s grounding Arrakis.”
“But, of course, a game is a much larger scale. So we need to expand upon that vision,” he continued. “We have our own army of concept artists who are sending things back and forth with Legendary all the time.”
A screenshot from Dune: Awakening (TBA), Funcom
Later in the video, Bylos also discussed how the sandworms are portrayed in the game, “The most iconic creature in the Dune universe is the sandworm of Arrakis. And so we’ve tried to represent this in the game in multiple ways.”
“So as a player your first steps on the open sand, you hear the hiss of the sand in the distance as a sandworm begins to move towards you. And when it gets close you hear the roar as it erupts from the sand nearby,” he shared. “And at that point, you have only seconds to live if you cannot make it to rocky ground. So this is your first experience with sandworms, and these are the little ones.”
“When you go into the deep desert, when you’re harvesting spice the giant ring mouth sandworms that we’ve seen in the film will erupt underneath the spice blows and suck harvesters and equipment down into the sand beneath them,” he continued. “There’s really only one rule: the sandworm will always come.”
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