What makes Dune: Awakening an MMO?

Hi, my name is Joel Bylos and I’m the Creative Director on Dune: Awakening. We keep referring to the game as an Open World Survival Massively Multiplayer Online game and I understand that this has fueled a lot of speculation among players.

I’m going to explore what it means to call our game an MMO and try to be as candid about our server structure as possible. I’ll also be using a bunch of terminology about MMOs that you may or may not be familiar with – I’ll try to explain as I go.

MMO vs MMORPG

We’re very deliberate in our communication about Dune: Awakening to use MMO but not MMORPG. Games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and Elder Scrolls Online have defined a type of progression and core game loops that typify the modern MMORPG. Things like classes, quest-driven progression, endgame raids, level gating etc.

Dune: Awakening walks a different path. It is a survival, open world, crafting game, and while it features contracts (which are a form of quest) and journeys (which are also a form of quest), they are not the core focus of the player progression system; they are designed more for an open world sandbox experience than the traditional quests in MMORPGs. Also, Dune: Awakening is more focused on a crafting and building driven progression – exploring a technology tree and creating weapons, tools, vehicles, and bases. We don’t have level gating on items, so for example, if your friend wants to craft and hand you the best weapon in the game, five minutes after you start playing, that’s fine.

The part of the acronym that we share, the Massively Multiplayer Online, that’s where we start to differ from survival games.

What is a Survival MMO compared to a Survival game?

The survival genre has exploded in the last few years with a lot of unique spins and approaches to the core formula. And with this explosion has come a myriad of different approaches to server and multiplayer setups.

There are single-player survival games like Subnautica or The Long Dark. There are small-group multiplayer survival games like Valheim or Sons of the Forest, which allow a group of friends to play together. There are larger survival games with officially hosted servers like Conan Exiles, Ark, or Rust, which generally allow dozens of players to play together.

These games tend to have some common traits, such as a single large map running on a dedicated (or client-based) server. Dune: Awakening has a server structure more in common with MMOs than with most survival games. There are also large-scale multiplayer systems in place to support social gameplay – both competitive and collaborative – in areas shared with hundreds of other players.

For example, the Exchange allows you to buy and sell items with other players – a feature commonly associated with MMOs. And yet, it’s also unlike most MMOs due to the lack of level gating. If you can buy it, you can usually equip it.

The Landsraad feature also shifts us away from being only Survival or only MMO. While we can’t go into the full details of the feature just yet, we can explain the basics. It’s inspired by the in-universe Landsraad, a galactic council made up of the Great Houses. The Landsraad’s decisions can result in sweeping implications for the entirety of Arrakis and how people play the game. The most exciting aspect is that the decisions made by the Landsraad are entirely dependent on player actions, which go beyond simply voting (although that will also be important). After all, this is Dune, with all its Machiavellian scheming.

These are just a few examples of MMO-like features. We look forward to discussing the details of more of them in the future.

How many others will I be playing with?

When you first start playing Dune: Awakening, you pick a server that will be your home. Each of these servers belong to a World and a World consists of many different servers.

As a player, you will meet and interact with players from other servers in your World. The best way to explain how this works is looking at how our Arrakis is structured.

Our Arrakis is made up of different and separate maps, some larger than others. Here are a few of the main ones:

• Hagga Basin:
  This is where you start out and where you will always return. It’s a big, persistent open world, similar in size to the map in Conan Exiles, and it consists of many different biomes. Here you must survive, build, and fight in the same space as several dozen other players who also belong to the server you picked. Players from other servers cannot come here. Player vs. player combat exists only in select areas of Hagga Basin.
• Social Hubs:
  These are cities or villages that act as social hubs, where players cannot build, drive vehicles, or engage in PvP, but instead go to interact with the Exchange, NPCs, vendors, and of course, other players. Here you will meet players from other servers in your World, and once it’s full, an instance is spawned, similar to how the technology works in many other MMOs.
• The Deep Desert: 
  This is a massive, seamless, open space, several times larger than Hagga Basin. Here you will encounter hundreds of other players from all the different servers in your World and it’s where large-scale guild player vs. player interactions take place including the battle for spice. You will also build and drive vehicles here. This is where the Coriolis storm will regularly sweep across, changing the landscape, and the location of key resources.
• Overland map:
  All these large but separate maps are connected by an overland map of the entire northern hemisphere of Arrakis, and it shows players moving around it in real time. Here you move between Hagga Basin, the hubs, and the Deep Desert. Traveling across the Overland map consumes fuel and water, and if you run out before reaching your destination, you’ll automatically enter a zone where you must scavenge for more.

The Overland Map, besides making the world feel seamless and connected, gives us the flexibility to expand after launch. Adding new areas to a single map is more difficult and restrictive than adding new locations to the Overland Map. With this framework in place, we can give you new places to explore after launch and beyond.

We look forward to sharing more details about the Overland map and other maps we haven’t mentioned yet in the future.

So, what does this all mean?

To define Dune: Awakening, we’ve had to talk a bit about what it is not, because it doesn’t fit into either the Survival nor the MMO box, as most people would know them. It has a survival core, a pretty unique server structure, and several important features which we think make using the MMO tag the best way to clearly communicate what the game is.

We believe Dune: Awakening’s complex server structure, where hundreds of players flow seamlessly between servers as they move to different areas of the game world, is doing something that other survival games are not.

On the spectrum of sandbox to theme park MMOs, Dune: Awakening is firmly on the sandbox side.

While there is content you might find in your typical MMO, such as contracts and the journey system (similar to quests), NPCs you can converse with, ecolabs that are similar to dungeons, character development through ability trees, progression through the ranks of the Atreides and Harkonnen, the Exchange, and the Landsraad feature, the key focus of Dune: Awakening is exploring, surviving, building, and thriving in an open sandbox world filled with other players. You can either collaborate or compete with those you encounter through politics, trade, and warfare. It’s a vast, open world full of social intrigue that you are a part of building and influencing, and you’re not grinding through content map by map.

There is one other area where Dune: Awakening will differ significantly from many other survival games. Due to its multiple MMO-based features, there is no single-player mode. You will have to be able to join our servers. Our plan is to allow private servers, at least for the Hagga Basin map, but we can’t promise this will be available for launch.

No doubt these answers leave you with even more questions, and we look forward to revealing more about Dune: Awakening in the time ahead.

Thank you for reading.

Best regards,
Joel Bylos
Creative Director