The Dune video game is Rust meets No Man’s Sky on the sands of Arrakis

The world of Dune feels tailor-made for a survival game.

You’ve got an incredibly harsh environment, a special suit that turns waste into resources, multiple factions with their own political machinations, and unfathomably huge horrors lurking under the sands, waiting to hunt you down.

Dune: Awakening looks to take Denis Villeneuve’s world and throw in a healthy amount of No Man’s Sky and Rust to create a survival game that has a lot of potential, and looks visually immaculate.

The game begins with your character stranded on the sands of Arrakis. With no water and no Stillsuit, your first challenge, and one of the toughest in the game according to developer Funcom, is to find shelter and sustenance.

The battle to find water seems to be the biggest obstacle in the early game. While a small amount of water can be gained by eating the few remaining plant fibres that are scattered around the world, eating too many of them will cause the player to be sick. Stilgar would not be happy.

The other way players can find water is by taking it from other players by force. While the exact scope of the player vs player action in the game hasn’t been nailed down, Funcom suggested that even from this early stage, players will be able to battle it out for the last few remaining drops of water.

Funcom later joked that more experienced players would fly Ornithopters down to the starting area and recruit low-level players into their legions with promises of water.

Skipping forward, players will then be able to build their own base. The base-building tech looks sophisticated, but it’s in the ways that Dune: Awakening seeks to skip over some survival game admin that is the most exciting. For example, if there’s a resource in any of your chests, you can access it directly from a fabricator. It doesn’t matter what is physically on your player. As long as the resource you need is in a chest that you own, you can craft the item.

“Funcom later joked that more experienced players would fly Ornithopters down to the starting area and recruit low-level players into their legions with promises of water”

This is a perfect example of putting the player’s time above realism, and it’s hugely appreciated. This is a fantasy world, and it’s fine if resources can teleport autonomously around your base. We won’t hold it against them.

Once you’ve built your base you’re then able to save a blueprint of it and move it around the world. Not only that, there’s an in-game auction house wherein players can buy and sell creations, meaning if your favourite creator has built a massive palace with room out the back for some sandworms, you can simply download the blueprint, and if you have the resources, it’s all yours.

The game is built on the visual foundation of the current films, however Funcom was quick to stress that they also liaised regularly with the estate of Dune author Frank Herbert when it came to to elements of the canon that are unique to the game.

Funcom describes the universe of Dune: Awakening as an alternate timeline. According to the developer, in the canon of the game, a pivotal decision made by a main character in the film series is taken as the canon choice, and the world is built going forward from that. Funcom declined to be more specific due to potential spoilers for the ongoing film series.

While the game starts as a traditional survival adventure, Funcom claimed that as the game progresses, your character will have the chance to influence the world of Arrakis politically. Be that doing missions for certain Great Houses, or influencing the economy of the world, the game stops being about literal survival and focuses more on fighting for your political life.

Funcom also spoke at length about Coriolis Storm, which is a PVP area in the game that will reset every week. This area, which is found in the most dangerous part of the map, will contain extremely high-level loot, but will also be fully PVP. Funcom said that it wants the area to be incredibly high stakes, meaning that everything on your player when you enter this area will be wiped, should your character be killed. The physical properties of the area will also change each week.

Dune: Awakening has a huge amount of potential, and feels like the perfect adaptation of Herbet and Villeneuve’s world. While the survival genre is well-worn at this point, there’s plenty of room for an extremely polished new competitor, especially if the intriguing late-game political thriller actually comes to pass.