Dune: Awakening may eventually take players beyond Arrakis to other planets

rockpapershotgun.com:

A decade or so ago there was a period when all videogames and especially all Unreal Engine videogames had to be brown and grey and dingy. "The Gears of Warrification of graphics," we used to call it, huddled up in the chest-high trenches with our Xbox 360 controllers. Survival MMO Dune: Awakening threatens to bring that back in a big way: the novel and films on which it’s based unfold, after all, on an entire planet made of sand.

Developers Funcom have various plans for sprucing up the aesthetic, however. For one thing, parts of Awakening take place underground, where there’s actual, canonical vegetation and thus, a wider range of colours. For another, it’s possible Dune: Awakening will ultimately leave the dunes behind and take us on a journey to another planet.

“In the books of Frank Herbert, it's quite clear that there's quite a lot of vegetation in places that are hidden out of the way of the sandstorms and crevices between stones,” Scott Junior, the game’s executive producer, told me during a roundtable interview at GDC. These sources of underground flora aren’t just for decoration, of course – they’re harvestable materials, with some of the most valuable being located in eco laboratories that have been abandoned for centuries.

"Yes, we are using that to spice up the world - sorry for the pun, but to get some different environments,” Junior continued. “Because when you're on Dune, there's a lot of brown, there's a lot of rocks, there's a lot of sand. And we want to break up that up and show some either more tropical environments or more alien takes on things.”

As for travelling to other planets in the Dune universe – if it happens, it’ll happen after the early access launch, but you can catch hints of possible destinations in the game’s character editor, which lets you choose a background and associated Great House, from villainous ivory Harkonnen to hearty and robust Atreides. “At the start of the project there was Giedi Prime, there was Caladan, all