There you have it, a ripple in the sand of release dates. Pause for a moment while we consider this phenomenon. Yes, yes, it is the unmistakable rumble of a major survival MMO considering its release date. Dune: Awakening has been thinking and has decided that “early 2025” is a good non-specific time to release into Early Access. That could mean January or February. Or March, I guess. April? Don’t be silly, it’s spring. Not April, surely. This beast looks hungry. It will eat before then. I predicted it. Especially after watching the trailer that was shown at Gamescom.
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The trailer was released during Gamescom's big Opening Night Live party. It quickly takes us through a new player's idealized opening experience, where they're thrown into the wilderness but find another player to team up with. “Working with others will always increase your chances of staying alive,” Funcom's developers say (they've never played Chained Together with Edwin and Nic). There's a fair bit of ornithopter flying, which seems like a real buzz.
As expected, most of the other elements we see are consistent with Dune's story. There are body shields, sandworms, and these hovercrafts I don't know the name of. You can even suck all the blood out of your enemies and put it into a machine to extract drinking water. (I especially like that you can sell the plans for your completed buildings to other players for money, but it seems like the least Dune-y thing in the entire trailer.) You'll also get to meet familiar characters from the fiction, like the famous protagonist Duniel Baggins Paul Atreides.
We've already heard the developers at Funcom say that they're playing with the source material in some major ways. Paul's father, for example, is alive and well, unlike in canon. Even the environment will undergo some changes. “The Dune in the movie shows no natural vegetation,” technical art director Richard Cawte said in a blog update, “which is not the case with our Dune.” Plants!? On Arrakis!? My outrage better come across as fake!! Because it is!!! I love plants!!!!
Edwin got a sneak peek at this clever survival game and came away “surprisingly enthusiastic.” Funcom has made similar multiplayer survival-o-crafts with Conan Exiles and has been in the sci-fi MMO business since Anarchy Online, so it makes sense that they were chosen to take the reins on this particularly important franchise.
There's a beta going on that you can still sign up for on the game's website if you want. For everyone else, it's time to crouch in the sand and stare pensively at the horizon for 5-6 months.