‘People tell you they are dead,’ Dune: Awakening devs on creating a new myth on Arrakis: the missing Fremen

I’m a Dune snob. Last week I had the chance to play Dune: Awakening and let’s just say I was less than happy that I was not a Fremen, nor did I get to interact with any. To me, these people are the heart and soul of everything Arrakis, even beyond the sand worms and Paul himself. Frustrated, I kept playing. The next day I spoke to Creative Director Joel Bylos and what he said didn’t just alleviate my worries but sucked me back into that spice trance once again.

My preview of Dune: Awakening didn’t begin with a visit from the Herald of the Change or a grand entry at Arrakeen, but in the sand of the Hagga Basin desert. Soon after I awoke surrounded by the wreckage of a crashed ornithopter, sun-stroke and dehydration beginning to impair me. I was no Fremen wearing a stillsuit in slip fashion, so I ran into the shade and started licking the leaves of moist fauna growing on the rocks to replenish my hydration factor. After my first interactions with enemies, it didn’t take long for me to notice the distinct lack of Fremen. With no Paul Atreides nor Fremen, I wondered how this game could possibly tackle any of the religion, politics, and myth that the novels do?

“There’s a main story to the game which sort of touches on some of these points and draws the player on a spiritual journey,” Bylos said, as footage of a sand worm flashed over us. “The game starts with a mysterious mission: find the Fremen. People tell you they are dead. They’re missing. They’re gone.”

In other interviews, Bylos has said that the player will not lead a holy war in Dune Awakening, one of the main myths driving the novel forward. Paul and the Fremen are somewhat symbiotic in the canon, and without one or the other there is no ‘terrible purpose.’ Giant sand worms, precious water, and telepathic witches – as much as Dune is about them, the internal conflict from the consequence of human action is why the story hasn’t relented its grip on the public consciousness since the 60s.

Byblos continues talking of the Fremen: “Both spirituality and religion come through from [the missing people], and then Spice itself has its own effect on you as a player. We’re not talking too much about that, but it plays a role in expanding your mind in the universe.” In some ways, this is the new myth that’s going to carry Dune: Awakening forward:  a power vacuum conflict that arises in the absence of the universe’s two most powerful forces. It’s enticing, that’s for sure.

It wasn’t all sunshine on Arrakis, though. The preview felt a little more like a tech demo. I fought enemies, built and flew an ornithopter, dehydrated myself to death, and ran to shelter from sand worms. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t scratch the surface on the potential of a Dune game. Albeit, the fact that diving into actual narrative and PVP wasn’t possible likely played a big part in this. 

Gunplay was fairly standard. As you explore Hagga Basin, you’ll stumble across different groups of enemies. There are a few different weapons accessible early on – a medley of projectile based weapons (a laser mining drill included) and then melee tools. Early on, melee combat is far from easy. You’re almost ushered into picking up a firearm. I asked Bylos about this.

“I think [emphasis on projectile combat] changes. The start of the game is more ranged as it’s in the desert and people don’t use shields out there. When you get to later parts of the game with enemies and shields, you’ve got to switch to melee, getting close is not really possible. We have true Dune shields, so shooting people with a gun doesn’t pop the shield, you have to get in there. The slow blade penetrates, right?”

I’ll admit, my experience in combat was fuelled by the hyperintense vigour of trying to run around the Gamescom convention centre in time for each appointment I’d made. Red Bull had been the only liquid touching my lips that day, so I was frantic. Anyway, all instances of melee combat involved me mashing the attack button without considering a ‘slow’ attack might even exist. At least Bylos told me about it in our conversation.

My next adventure included building an ornithopter. The developers spawned in all the pieces needed to construct one, and all I had to do was cycle through each part and attach them to each other. After building it, flying around was smooth, responsive, and pretty immersive. You even get the option to collapse the wings mid-flight and let the wind and gravity have their way with you in the ‘Vulture’ mode. ‘I will permit it to pass over me and through me,’ or so the litany goes.

The ornithopter will serve as your transport across the open world desert. Unfortunately, it seems as though traversal between Hagga Basin, the accompanying social hubs, the deep desert, and other maps will only be possible through a 2D overlay map.

“You can fly around on that map,” Bylos said, “see other players moving around, and go to the different locations from there. In the future, we’re going to expand that with dynamic encounters, too.” This wasn’t necessarily surprising – a true open-world MMO is staggeringly hard to pull off without abstracting the overarching map. In my short period with the game, I wasn’t able to head to the outer regions of the map to test what happens at the borders. You’d probably die from sunstroke or dehydration before then, anyway.

There was little room for PVP in the short demo I played, so I spoke to Bylos about it instead. “So the end-game map is mostly PVP. It’s a large PVP space, you can run into other players and so forth. We didn’t want to make a game for ‘sharks,’ we like to call them,” he said. “People who like to kill others for no reason. So the idea is you have a lot of options for escaping too.”

Bylos then detailed spice blows, server-wide events that draw people in. That way, griefers and sharks are directed there, instead of your base. “We don’t really want people knocking your sandcastles over,” he said. From my conversation with Bylos, alongside the developer deep dives, it’s clear that there’s going to be a lot of care put into protecting players. The game is angled towards co-operative play, rather than conquest. Ultimately, this makes a lot of sense. This is a game about crafting Arrakis into your own shape, not destroying it.

My preview had filled my head with curiosity. There’s a lot going on in Dune: Awakening, and a lot of it veers away from source material. I wanted to know what is going to stick, so I asked the all-important question. Bylos said no, you can’t transform into a giant sand worm, but “maybe one day, but not at launch.” He went on to tell me about places where you will also discover the work of Fremen and Kynes (Arrakis’ planetologist) and their experiments in terraforming. “[E]cology labs beneath the earth, plants growing everywhere… They were doing experiments to make the ground more fertile … you, yourself, you may be able to do that. But not at launch.”

It’s clear that Dune: Awakening is an ambitious project. It’s future-thinking, if you will. The developers will be hoping to keep it around as long as Conan Exiles and its other projects too, so I asked how they’re going to keep it a game true to its origins with so much content to be added later.

“I think there’s plenty of adventures to come in Dune,” Bylos said not before dropping in Brian Herbert’s influence and consultancy on the source material. “We’ll keep it running for as long as we can. I mean, we’ve had a game running (Anarchy Online) since 2001. So, we’ll just keep adding stuff to it. There’s plenty to mine from the Dune universe.”

With my time with Dune: Awakening now at a close, and my conversation with Joel Bylos over too, I have plenty of lingering questions. The missing Fremen is the new myth commanding me back into the Dune universe, although I still have concerns.

Dune: Awakening was fun. Aside from the likely technical bugs you experience during an early preview, it plays well. The foundations are there for a solid survival MMO. There are complex systems to abide by, seeds for full-fledged factional alignment, base building, trading, and the architecture of Dune’s mechanics is fleshed out too. I fear that this won’t be enough for many. Dune: Awakening is a very well done survival MMO wearing a Dune skin, and though it looks good, there were times I couldn’t really connect with it.

The survival elements of the game make a lot of sense. Logically, it’s rudimentary. You’re fighting against a vicious environment first, inter-personal conflict comes second. Devastating heat will scorch you inside your stillsuit, while running around on foot is a peril task in and of itself thanks to worms and dehydration. You’re given a simple mission which is to simply survive. My takeaway is that ultimately, it feels good to scramble about Arrakis. Will you be able to do so for an extended period of time? That’s going to depend entirely on the game’s seasonal structures (which Bylos said will not be subscription based), missions, narrative, and how it plans to incentivise play.