How Dune: Awakening Tackles the Challenge of Arrakis as a Singular Setting

“Arrakis is Dune, and Dune is sand,” said Dune: Awakening executive producer Scott Junior, describing the desert planet that serves as the setting for the upcoming multiplayer survival game. This statement is both a blessing and a curse. Arrakis’s forbidding desert landscape and terrifying sandworms make it instantly iconic and recognizable to fans, but also make it quite the difficult setting for a survival game.

The Dune: Awakening team had to balance keeping the recognizable Arrakis fans want to see and adding some variation to the unrelenting desert landscape. Game Rant recently spoke with Junir about just that: how the team navigated the endless sand seas of Arrakis.

Survival Games Thrive With Multiple Biomes, But Arrakis Is Different

Most survival games challenge their players by introducing them to a variety of biomes, each with its own unique resources and challenges. “Most games like this, you go from the forest biome to the desert biome to the tundra to the volcano region, and we can’t do that,” explained Junior. Most of Arrakis’ surface is unbroken desert, with the occasional patch of rocky scrublands, the polar caps, and a few larger settlements like Arrakeen serving as the only variation.

The Dune: Awakening team was willing to take on this challenge, however, as they wanted their interpretation of Arrakis to be as lore-accurate as possible. Junior explained that the art team worked to create what variety they could by altering how the lighting looked in different areas or including small “pops” of greenery like cacti and other desert plants. Dune: Awakening also plans to make use of the scrublands seen in the film Dune Part Two, giving players an area they can visit that is not one hundred percent desert. In addition, the team drew heavily from author Frank Herbert’s original inspiration for Arrakis:

When Herbert is describing Dune, he’s talking about the beaches in Oregon, which have quite a bit of vegetation coming up through the sand dunes. So we have some regions further in that have cacti and shrubs and other things there. It’s difficult not to just be sand and rock all the time, but the art team, I feel, has done a really good job of using what we can with the game to make the areas you go to look different.

Arrakis May Be A Giant Desert, But That’s What Fans Want

Junior also revealed that the team took comfort in knowing that, while Arrakis’ bleak deserts may present some difficulty, it is ultimately what Dune fans want to see. Dune fans want a lore-accurate Arrakis, and including a variety of non-desert biomes simply wouldn’t accomplish that. “Ultimately, we feel people are coming here to be on Arrakis and to play the first game where you’re living on Arrakis and experiencing Arrakis,” Junior said of the game’s fans. They want a rocky desert with scarce water and the threat of Dune sandworms around every corner, and that is what the team is giving them.

However, Junior did hint that post-launch plans for Dune: Awakening may include journeying to some areas of Arrakis that contain more variation from the standard desert. The poles of the planet and the deepest reaches of its mountain ranges may be explored in future updates, as will the Fremen sietches which are not focused on at launch due to their prominence in the films. Dune: Awakening’s team has robust post-launch plans in place, and these include the eventual addition of more maps and more places to travel to in the overworld.

Game

My Favorite Games
My Played Games
My Games Wishlist

Advertisement

Systems

Advertisement