Funcom has been calling Dune Awakening a survival MMORPG for many years of development now. But it’s also not an MMO. But it offers multiplayer gameplay on a massive scale. But it’s a survival title. And MOP’s own Larry found it better when approached like a sandbox MMORPG. So what the hell is this thing? Funcom is trying to explain, and in doing so it’s both embracing the MMO nature while dissembling over the genre at the same time – all of which is going to sound very familiar to MMORPG players who just lived through the last year of New World doing the exact same thing. We’re tired.
“Dune: Awakening is an open world, multiplayer, survival game on a massive scale, with content and mechanics you haven’t seen in combination before,” the studio opens in its explainer. “Labels can be weird, especially when you’re making a game like this, and a while back we decided to drop ‘MMO’ from our top-level, one-liner description. Many of you have been asking why, and the reason is simply that we saw expectations were veering too far into the classic MMORPG paradigm.”
The post then hangs its hat primarily on the survival sandbox elements of the game including its base building, resource management, harvesting, and crafting, all of which are stock MMORPG features all the way back to the dawn of the genre. Yet a few paragraphs later, Funcom also talks up how the game “goes beyond the typical survival game formula by introducing a large-scale multiplayer world and large-scale multiplayer mechanics” and how it features “several mechanics [fans] will recognize from MMO games.” These include the multi-server trading marketplace, social hubs, server-wide chats, guilds, and an endgame loop. Again, stock MMORPG features in a game that is transparently an MMORPG.
There are also repeated explanations about how the game’s servers, worlds, and maps within the game will work in terms of both scale and mechanics. To summarize once again: Hagga Basin will the the primarily PvE starting point for players that can be accessed by hundreds but only allows 40 concurrent players at one time, social hubs are central points of trade and inter-player interaction that doesn’t involve PvP, and the Deep Desert is the FFA PvP area where “hundreds of players [will be] spread across its many points of interest.” All of these areas can be traveled via an overland map that effectively works as a fast travel feature, and Funcom promises that there are more maps for players to discover.
Finally, Funcom addresses functions that will attempt to address server load, including queuing for connecting to a server’s Hagga Basin, the game’s multiple server locations around the globe, and the promise of “thousands of servers grouped together in hundreds of worlds available at launch.”
Also of note this week is an AMA Funcom held with players yesterday. Answers here include a rough projection of console launch sometime in 2026, the promise that private server functionality is being worked on but will most likely not be available on launch, confirmation of a server list ahead of head start and launch to help friends coordinate, and some attempts to prevent zerging in the Deep Desert such as friendly fire for guilds and the removal of nametags, though the devs admit preventing this behavior is difficult.
