Survival MMO Dune: Awakening takes place in an 'alternate' timeline
Last year we got our first look at Dune: Awakening, the open world survival MMO from Funcom set on a «vast and seamless Arrakis» that will be shared by «thousands of players.» But while the cinematic trailer(opens in new tab) showed us some familiar sights like the desert planet of Arrakis and a sandworm consuming a spice harvester, we still had plenty of questions.
Last week I got a few of those questions answered when I spoke with Dune: Awakening's creative director, Joel Bylos, about how the MMO fits into the Dune universe and the timeline of the fiction.
Dune: Awakening is set in the year 10199 AG, Bylos said, which is about eight years after the events of 2021's Dune film. But in the MMO, those events won't play out quite the same way people familiar with the books or films will remember them.
«It's similar to the books, but we've gone with an alternate history, like a 'what-if', if you want,» Bylos said. «We worked closely with the Herbert [family] and Legendary [Pictures], and we found a point, a single point, the single pebble that starts a landslide.»
This point, said Bylos, represents «where if just this one thing was different in the universe then it would change a lot of what comes after, and change it in a way that makes for more of a virtual world kind of experience, where players can see all the familiar things that they'd expect to see.»
Bylos unfortunately wouldn't tell me specifically what that 'pebble' of story was («I'm not allowed to talk about that yet,» he said) or how changing it would result in an alternative timeline. But this change is meant to allow players in Dune: Awakening to interact with characters from the books they otherwise wouldn't be able to because «a lot of major characters die»
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