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.
- After survival games like Conan Exiles, Funcom says it's made "a game with its own identity" out of Dune: Awakening – and I believe it
- Dune: Awakening is so much more than a survival game or an MMO - it's a unique sci-fi experience shaped by Frank Herbert's 60-year-old lore and all that came after it
Can’t wait for the exciting zones and environments in the Dune MMO. Environments such as: desert. https://t.co/c8js9WGIxbAugust 23, 2022
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.
Should’ve been more like Mass Effect or The Witcher where choices effect the game world. And MMO feels like an excuse to mine a universe for battle passes, loot boxes and micro transactionsAugust 23, 2022
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.
A Dune MMO seems like the thing you do when you mistake a bunch of people going to see a movie for a bunch of people being invested in a concept broadlyAugust 23, 2022
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.
