'A lot of us are old school MMO players': Dune: Awakening's creative director on how Star Wars Galaxies was a 'huge inspiration' for the new survival game
I'm not sure I've ever heard of a bolder conceit for a game—or a more doomed one—than Star Wars Galaxies' original pitch that almost no one would get to be a Jedi. In the Star Wars films and expanded universe, only a tiny portion of the trillions of people across the galaxy were Force-sensitive, so the developers locked Jedi abilities behind an opaque set of conditions that made becoming a Jedi difficult and mysterious. Eventually the developers were pushed to make becoming a Jedi easier, and in what one of the developers called «the most infamous patch in videogame history,» they turned Jedi into a basic class option. The game was never the same after.
Before that, though, Star Wars Galaxies was a true sandbox MMO, an online space that players created their own identities and goals within. Impossibly ambitious, sure, doomed to turn off a lot of players, sure, but bold in a way that made the players who loved it really love it. I was thinking about that commitment to Jedi scarcity when I talked to the creative director of upcoming survival MMO Dune: Awakening after watching the new film, which is all about Paul Atreides becoming Dune's equivalent of Luke Skywalker, to grossly oversimplify things.
«It's funny you mentioned Star Wars Galaxies—that was a huge inspiration for us,» Joel Bylos said. «That's the style of MMO we really like, the old sandboxy MMOs. Then World of Warcraft came out and everyone copied that for a few years, or still do. But a lot of us are old school MMO players. Funcom's been around for awhile—even made one of the originals, with Anarchy Online.»
Bylos has some MMO bona fides: he may not have been making games back in 2001 when Funcom launched Anarchy Online, but he was the lead content designer for Funcom's 2012 MMO The Secret World, a flawed but creatively ambitious game that may deserve credit as one of the last games in the genre to try to do something really different from WoW. In his opinion, MMOs peaked in popularity around 2010, with
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