Dune: Awakening's combat 'is much more second-to-second and intense than you would find in an MMO'

pcgamer.com:

One of the things Denis Villeneuve's Dune film highlights is that warfare on Arrakis relies on some quite contrasting flavors of fighting. When the soldiers of House Atreides and House Harkonnen clash in the movie, aircraft are raining artillery fire from above while warriors protected by Holtzman shields duel with old-fashioned blades down below. That sense of battles taking place on multiple, overlapping fronts is something Funcom's massively multiplayer survival game Dune: Awakening aims to capture as well.

Speaking to us as part of an exclusive interview in the PC Gaming Show, creative director Joel Bylos describes a game that will escalate from the player being a lone outcast sneaking around with a knife, stabbing people to steal their water, to all-out war. «By the end of the game perhaps you're running a guild,» Bylos says, «you have a fleet of vehicles, ornithopters flying in formation, sand bikes cruising across the desert beneath them, tanks kicking up a cloud of dust as you drive to a spice blow in the distance in order to harvest with your guild. You see in the distance another guild coming towards you. And just as you clash, you hear the rumble of a sandworm coming. That's combat in Dune: Awakening.»

That's a scenario your bog-standard hotbar of abilities on cooldowns wouldn't be able to do justice. Which is why game director Viljar Sommerbakk says, «Combat in our game is much more second-to-second and intense than you would find in an MMO, for instance.» Funcom is drawing on previous experience and expertise there: Sommerbakk was world designer for Anarchy Online while Bylos was creative director on Conan: Exiles, and both worked as designers on Age of Conan. 

That kind of intense, overlapping combat is one