Some fans aren't convinced by the Dune MMO, and maybe they're right

Dune MMO
(Image credit: Funcom)

A Dune MMO was announced at Gamescom last night, but potential players are far from convinced by the idea.

Dune: Awakening is an open world survival MMO. Announced last night with a trailer featuring sand worms, Paul Atreides, and an awful lot of the desert of arrakis, it was arguably one of the bigger reveals of Opening Night Live. A Steam page explains more about how you'll survive in the hostile world of Frank Herbert's sci-fi masterpiece, but the project has been met with a powerful dose of scepticism on social media.

For some, the world of Dune simply isn't an interesting setting for an MMO, a genre that traditionally offers a wide array of different biomes and cultural areas to explore. On a desert planet, that option isn't really available.

For others, it's the specific concept of a Dune MMO that's the problem. Whether players bounce off the genre itself, or simply prefer not to play with other people, the concept on a multiplayer take just isn't that attractive.

Then there are the people who think Dune is simply a boring book, an even more boring film, and that a silver screen success doesn't automatically mean you've got a multimedia audience ready and waiting for everything your franchise can throw at it. It's a cynical approach, perhaps, but not one that's entirely unfair. Last year's film starring Timothy Chalamet was a success, but it's not as though recent RTS release Dune: Spice Wars was a complete, runaway hit - an all-time peak of 8,400 players on Steam isn't to be sniffed at, but it's not exactly a phenomenon.

Finally, there's the suggestion that perhaps Dune simply isn't a good fit for this type of game. One player points out that "you wouldn't really be able to influence Dune" unless you play as a major character, which a survival MMO - even one that seems to put Paul Atreides at the centre of its trailer - is unlikely to let you do. GamesRadar+'s Joel also points out that while "Dune is a setting with an emphasis on tough, moment-to-moment survival," it's also "a narrative about grand political intrigue and questions of fate." Put even more simply, "Arrakis is a hardcore survival game, but Dune is a grandiose space opera." In the end, "whichever of [those] two games you make, somebody's going to be unhappy because they brought something else from the book."

Developer Funcom hasn't yet hinted at a release date for Dune: Awakening, and given the sheer complexity of MMO development, it's likely to be several years before we get the new Dune MMO in our hands, so who knows - perhaps the doubters will eventually be proven wrong.

Here's everything announced during Gamescom Opening Night Live.

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Ali Jones
News Editor

I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.

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