Dune: Awakening is "not an MMO" anymore, says the game's director, but it's still "quite complicated" compared to other survival games

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Defining a game's genre can sometimes be tricky. For instance, is the varied Crimson Desert a true action-RPG or more of an open-world game like Grand Theft Auto? Similarly, figuring out what lane the packed survival RPG Dune: Awakening lives in has been a bugbear for the devs, though they gradually landed on a particular label early on.

Joel Bylos, game director of Dune: Awakening, discusses trying to define Funcom's take on Frank Herbert's universe in a new interview with FRVR. "Survival game" felt like an immediately fitting label, but the development team had broader aspirations, too. Bylos says, "I think that's one of the biggest challenges we had during development, how to describe it."

"We had this online server setup," he muses. "It's quite complicated compared to most survival games and we wanted to have multiple maps – so we weren't really sure, and then, at some point, we were describing it as an MMO because we figured it was easy."

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Fair enough – Dune: Awakening is large, it involves multiplayer, and you need to be online to play it. All MMO boxes are ticked. At the same time, the game isn't really an RPG akin to World of Warcraft, and it features an undercurrent of PvP due to the resource scarcity inherent to surviving on Arrakis.

All this led Funcom to distancing the project from being called an MMO a few months after it launched in June 2025. Now, Bylos doesn't believe it's an MMO at all, at least not currently.

"I've worked on multiple MMOs for sure, but I think there was a weird space where we were trying to do slightly more," he adds. "We have this big, connected world, we have this big deep desert with lots of players being able to go in there."

So, "It's not an MMO is my strong feeling right now. It's definitely not," Bylos decides. But whatever you consider it, Dune: Awakening is still in early access on Steam, with console releases penciled in for this year.

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Dune: Awakening fans "so disappointed" by no Polar Cap in 1.4, Funcom says it's "a huge amount of work" but the devs "are still very much actively working on the new map."

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Anthony McGlynnContributing Writer

Anthony is an Irish entertainment and games journalist, now based in Glasgow. He previously served as Senior Anime Writer at Dexerto and News Editor at The Digital Fix, on top of providing work for Variety, IGN, Den of Geek, PC Gamer, and many more. Besides Studio Ghibli, horror movies, and The Muppets, he enjoys action-RPGs, heavy metal, and pro-wrestling. He interviewed Animal once, not that he won’t stop going on about it or anything.

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