During our recent trip to Oslo to play Funcom's Dune Awakening game, the developer also organized a roundtable Q&A where the press could ask a few questions directly to Game Director Joel Bylos. You can find the full transcript of the conversation on the game's features and mechanics below. As a reminder, Dune Awakening is still slated for a Q1 launch on PC (where it will support NVIDIA DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation on day one) and later on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X.
From what I've seen, the PVP seems mostly going to be world PVP. But is there going to be any kind of game mode where you are instanced for some kind of ranked mode where you can compete and maybe rank up?
No, the plan is to keep it to world PvP.
You mentioned before having the limitation of portraying the Fremen in the game. Were there any other instances of things that you could or could not do because of the movies? How did that impact your take on the game?
Yeah, sure, plenty of things. For example, they're working on the third movie now and I thought, oh, they're gonna be loosened up a little after the second movie's out and it has been such a huge success that they're not gonna be as worried about what we're portraying in Dune Awakening.
And then they announced the third movie and they came to us and said, oh, by the way, all these things from the second book, you can't use them. And I'm like, guys, the game is half built around those things already because we've been working on it for X years and then we had a long conversation and it's kind of okay. But there were things that, yeah, they didn't want us to show.
I don't want to go into too many specifics because it kind of spoils the game and the third movie. But there are things that, because I knew we couldn't rely on the first book, I took a lot of the stuff from the second book and put it in the game because I was like, well, the first book, I know they're making two movies out of that one, and I didn't know they were going to make a third movie.
About eight months ago, I found out they were doing that, and I had a conversation with Legendary. They're great partners to work with. I've heard horror stories about working with, say, Star Wars, and it's nothing like that. These guys are great at sharing with us, they're great at keeping us in the loop. But they also want to make sure that when Denis does his vision for certain things in the world, we haven't already put out something that sort of would change that or conflict with that. I can give an example, a very specific one: the trailer we saw with the old history.
Originally, that trailer showed Paul in the future, sitting on his throne, talking about the past, talking about this other universe he sees, but they were very clear that he can't be sitting on a throne. We can't imply that Paul is in any way a king or an emperor. So, we changed it to him standing up in front of a stone mural, and that was because, which is kind of flattering, they said, look, the visuals for this are so nice, it could be something that Denis did, and we don't want people to make that mistake.
We were like, okay. They were worried that it might actually be taken as a trailer for the third movie or something, so that's actually a bit flattering, but it's also a restriction that comes back to us. In general, it's been great to work with them. We got to go to Budapest and walk around the sets of the films and things like that, so we've been very involved with working tightly with them.
But yeah, there's always constraints and like I said, I think that actually drives us to more creativity. It forces us to think around corners, and I think that it puts us in a place to make the game super interesting for people who already know the story of Dune and want to see what this alternate take looks like.
When creating Dune Awakening, which existing games do you see it appealing the most?
It's a tough one. I'll just say survival games first and foremost, I think there's a huge number of people who play survival games. I think we've seen massive successes in that space. We made Conan Exiles, so we know that crowd.
Also, anybody who likes to play with their friends and muck around a bit, I think it's a pretty good experience for that. And just people who are into detailed, interesting worlds, and of course, that includes people who are into Dune, but also kind of just people who like to play around in a nice cool open world and see what's there.
The example of the gameplay given here today obviously is to show off the combat in one of the dungeons of Dune Awakening. Going a little bit further with that, obviously players want to feel rewarded for the content that they do. In the instance of doing a dungeon, for example, how is the looting in that case? Is it like, throughout the dungeon, you pick stuff up on the side, or is there just one main end goal at the end of it?
Depending on the stylization of the progression of the location, it is mostly towards the end, but there can be tidbits throughout the way. We have to see exactly how players respond to how we're distributing rewards. Right now, we have a reward for everybody - as long as you get to the end boss, everyone gets a version of the reward. We're going to see how that works for the economy to see if we need to adjust anything there, but that's the current approach. There are other things along the way, but by grouping together, you will not be penalised for playing with your friends.
There are types of resources that only exist in ecology labs. There are types of resources that only exist in fallen shipwrecks. In particular, it's tied to the type of item it is. Vehicles and vehicle parts can only be mostly found in ecology labs, and suspenser tech and Holtzman shield technology can only be found in these ecology labs where it's been locked away for 10,000 years.
Things like modern weapons and armors, a lot of those are locked away in shipwrecks that have fallen, so you need to go to those locations to get those components. We have an instanced looting system, which means that everybody gets their own version of what the chest has, so everyone rolls on the chest and gets their own thing. There's no loot stealing from other people in a sense. But all the dungeons are open, so it is quite possible for you to come across a dungeon where someone's just run it and there's no enemy inside because they've just killed them all for you. You run in and get your own loot. It's your lucky day, you've got a jackpot and you didn't have to do much work. But it's spread out enough that that doesn't happen that often.
Finally, the other thing I was going to mention is we have a unique schematic system in Dune Awakening, which I think is maybe somewhat interesting for people who play survival games. In the technology tree, you unlock schematics that you can craft infinitely, but in the world, you find unique schematics that you can only craft one or two or three of, and this is what drives our economic system in the game. You might find a special type of Lasgun, and you can only craft one of them. You'd have to run that dungeon many times to get more of that particular gun. Also, they can be repaired a certain number of times before the durability goes to zero, and then you will be like, I need to go back and run that dungeon because I really like that gun or that armour.
In the deep desert, because we're wiping it every week, you can have stuff like a really cool gun that only shows up once every six months. Maybe your guild wants to get as many of those schematics in that week as possible, so you're the only people on the server who can craft that gun. It's a real driver of this rarity and uniqueness of items. That's the loot philosophy in the game right now.
WCCFTECH: I was curious if there are any plans to enable privately hosted servers for the roleplaying communities in Dune Awakening.
Yeah, so it's an ongoing discussion. We have the ability to do it. What we don't want to do is release our server code to people because it's slightly different than how it's been in the past.
There's a discussion going on about whether we can host servers for people, kind of like Fallout 76 allows people to host, they pay Bethesda but they get their server. We're thinking about how to do this in the best possible way. We haven't made any clear decisions on it yet because it's a complicated thing, especially because the game is made of multiple maps, and one server is usually one map. Essentially, you'd be renting four maps, because you'd have to rent the main map and then all of the social hubs, and then the deep desert is nine maps using server meshing.
They're all tied together, so it becomes very complicated. In order to rent a private world, you would have to pay the cost of 15 servers, and that is not something we want to put on players, so then we need to figure out the best configuration. Maybe people just want to rent the main map and that's fine, and then we can allow people to do things like speed up progression and change variables on that map, but that's why it's complicated. We're still under discussion. I don't know if we'll have it sorted out for launch, but it's definitely not off the table, and it's something we're discussing.
Are there trade auction houses, that sort of thing?
We have a place called the Exchange in the major cities. You can go there and put things on the Exchange for sale, buy and sell orders, that kind of thing.
In terms of player trade, when you meet a player in the world, you can just click on them, choose trade, and exchange items with each other. You can also do the classic survival thing and just dump it on the ground and someone can pick it up. But I'm not sure we have the permission set up so that you could pick up someone else's loot bag.
Follow-up question about PVP. If there's not gonna be any instanced PvP, but will it be possible to duel someone, to challenge someone to a one-on-one duel? In the movies, we saw some of this.
I want to do that in the future, but it's not gonna be there for launch. I'm sorry about that, but yeah, I just couldn't fit it in the time scale for the game.
When you die in Dune Awakening, how much do you lose of what you collected?
I'm not gonna dare to try and remember the percentages, but you don't drop any of your items, you lose resources. If you're carrying scrap metal, stone, spice, I think you drop all of your spice, 100% of whatever spice you're carrying, 100% of the coins you're carrying, the money you're carrying, but there's a banking system so you can bank money to avoid losing it. And then I think it's 30%ish of the resources you're carrying that are lost upon death. Of course, you can run back to pick it up from your corpse. People cannot loot your corpse in PvE areas of the game, but there are PvP areas of the game where they can.
I really like the ability customization that you guys have. I was kind of wondering, is there a possibility to save builds of abilities so somebody can hotkey to them really quickly to switch?
No. That's a great quality of life suggestion that we should have. We need to figure out how we handle cooldowns and swapping out abilities when they're on cooldown and off cooldown. Yes, we want it. We need to figure out the best way to do it. But yeah, it's definitely one of those quality of life things we'd like to have.
Thank you for your time.
