If you're anything like me, the first time you heard about Dune: Awakening, your ears perked up at the phrase 'they're making a Dune game,' then immediately shut off at 'and it's a survival MMO'.

Awakening has some very lofty goals. It is a shared open-world survival game, so players can encounter, work with, and compete with others. The game takes players through four stages that Funcom internally refers to as Survive,

Being a multiplayer survival game set on a vast desert planet, Dune Awakening has to work hard to avoid being repetitive. There’s only so much sand you can run across before it

Dune Awakening creative director Joel Bylos revealed during a press Q&A earlier this month that "a bunch of constraints" were put in place for the team as part of its collaboration with Hollywood. This, it turns out, was one of the core reasons why the game takes place in an alternate history.