Awakening’s Creative Director Joel Bylos Talks the Endgame Surprises, Spice, Vehicle Building and When We Can Expect to Ride a Sandworm (EXCLUSIVE)

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Awakening’s Creative Director Joel Bylos Talks the Endgame Surprises, Spice, Vehicle Building and When We Can Expect to Ride a Sandworm (EXCLUSIVE)

Gamescom 2024 allowed hundreds of game developers to showcase what they’ve been working on, and what fans can look forward to in the coming months. With regards to Funcom, of course, this means showing the work of Joel Bylos and his team with Dune: Awakening.

Thankfully, we were lucky enough to discuss the game in all its glorious detail during a face-to-face interview that covered more than we should, but it did prove one thing to me; not only does Bylos care, but he gets the Dune franchise so much more than most.

Dune: Awakening’s Joel Bylos Tells All About What’s in Store For Fans

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Dune: Awakening is soon to release and bring us the perfect representation of Arrakis. Image Credit: Funcom.

So, first and foremost, for the FandomWire readers who may not know who you are or what you’re working on, would you mind illuminating us?

Yeah, sure. My name’s Joel Bylos. I’m the Creative Director of Dune Awakening.

It was quite a big thing when you revealed that it was an alternate timeline to that of the books and the films, separate but not separate, what was the thinking behind that, rather than just being in the same universe?

So I think there’s a couple of things. From the story perspective, Paul creates a problem, because if you want to have a world with multiple players it’s pretty obvious whose side they should join and who they should be working for, and so you don’t get any conflict between the players in that way. The other side of it is I think the books and the movies do such a good job of telling that story that I don’t know if people want to rehash the exact same story in the game.

The idea for us was if you come to this knowing the books and the movies you’ll be able to play a slightly different version of the story and see something different right and maybe that’s interesting for people hopefully not rehashing what’s already been almost perfected, I mean, Herbert’s original work is a masterpiece, right? And then what Villeneuve’s been doing with them is spectacular.

It’s just, I don’t know if people, maybe people want to play a single-player game where they play as Paul, and that would be great. But we aren’t making that game, so I didn’t want to try and, you know, I didn’t want to try and cram something in that would, you know.

And then it’s also like like are we doing a bad job with the canon? Are we making it because we have to? I think it’s much safer for all these books that are being written [and the movies] it’s easier for them to say the game is that old timeline and it does its thing and it’s great, and keep them separate.

With the success of the books and more recently the films, do you feel it has added any pressure for yourselves to deliver with a property that’s so important to so many?

Oh yeah, it changed massively. Right when we started on this the first movie wasn’t out and there wasn’t any hype around Dune, don’t get me wrong, people have always loved Dune but I mean it wasn’t in the zeitgeist in the same way it is now.

“The games that I admire, is kind of the old Skyrim sort of thing.”

So the first movie was good and then the second movie was stellar and it’s sort of just it’s grown and grown and the game has had to grow as well like expectations-wise and things like that. I feel the weight of the expectation now in a way but I mean I’m confident in what we’re doing as a team.

Did the films change like did the success of the films change what you were aiming for and your processes?

I think it didn’t change our process much. We were working with Legendary right from the beginning and we were kind of developing the game in parallel as they were working on the film. So they were sending us 3D scanned assets of things from the set, and we also visited the set to see what they were building and kind of taking some of the inspiration into our art as well.

We were also always talking back and forth with them about what we were doing so it’s always been a pretty strong collaboration I think but as I’ve said, I think the scope of the game got larger over time. I think it had maybe more to do with Tencent buying Funcom at some point as well like we were a smaller company, right? So the scope of the game changed more from that, I think, as well.

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Dune: Awakening’s Sandworms are just the start. Image Credits: Funcom.

Did the Tencent purchase make it much larger, much *******?

Yeah, I think if you look at Conan Exiles, the last game we made, had a certain scope and size, and Dune: Awakening was like a slightly ******* version of Conan Exiles back in the day. We were modestly investing towards something and then it was like “No no, let’s go *******”, and we have the backing to do that.

With the alternate timeline and the reasons behind it already explained, how did you go about choosing what to take from the film and the books and what to exclude?

So I think, like, there’s… So I have a list, I have a document, like a Word doc, called Fantasies.docx. And it’s a list of Dune fantasies that I think people want to have. I’ve pulled that list out from the books, movies, and even the board games. Everything that I’ve read and done to do with Dune. And sort of like, hey, here are all the fantasies that I think people want. And then which ones can we do in the video game? And how does that work?

So that was kind of how I approached pulling stuff out. Like, in the movies, the Ornithopters are so cool. We knew people would want to fly them. So we built them into the game The Sandworm is obviously the number one thing people know about Dune. It’s really complex and interesting you know, the way it works in the game.

I mean Spice is a thing and actually, I talked to Legendary a little bit about the Villeneuve stuff. The game does a little more with Spice than maybe the film stuff does, because it expands on that a bit, lore wise.

So when you say expands and does more with it, do you mean from the books or the film’s interpretation of Spice? Or both?

Well, it’s a bit of both, right? Like the way Paul describes his visions in the books and the way things happen to the player in the game, it’s grounded in what’s in the descriptions from the books, but obviously, it’s a different story in a different set of circumstances. I think the horror of what Spice can do to the human mind comes across nicely and is probably more of an appropriate medium as well.

Dune: Awakening Isn’t Just for Fans of the Universe, But New Players Too

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Dune: Awakening will allow you to live out your wildest Arrakis-based dreams. Image Credit: Funcom.

It’s no secret that the lore of the Dune universe is dense, so how are you approaching it so that both those who haven’t any idea and also the ****-hard fans get something from Dune: Awakening?

The idea is that we try to guide players by treating them like they don’t know anything about the universe whatsoever. The first thing is that you’re not from Arrakis, and in fact, your character is coming to Arrakis for the first time. So they know less than anybody, right? And so it’s like you kind of *****. You have to learn how to survive, right? And you have to learn how to survive this really dangerous desert.

It’s funny because in the beta I have some people like, oh, I’m trying to sandwalk, you know, and I’m trying to walk without rhythm and the game’s not letting me. And my response is always:

Well, your character doesn’t know anything about this right now. Your character has no idea, just like in the movies when Paul is trying to sandwalk for the first time! You’re not Fremen like your character can’t do it yet, right?

And that’s kind of the idea we approached with. So, coming from that lens, it’s easier to be like, hey, here is how this works and give people that kind of option. And if you’re a Dune fan, I think you can kind of, you know, you’ll like intuit things a little bit faster, I think.

Dune comes with a sort of a set of expectations and people have read the source material, but then there are people who haven’t. Think back to when we all played Destiny, we didn’t know anything about that world but over time they built that in. We do the same thing. We world build Dune for people and people who have read it will be like “I know what they’re doing now I get that oh that’s cool”, and they’ll also get to see a little bit of how history is different. That’s where I think our strength ***** in that even if you’ve read Dune you’ll be surprised you.

The alternate timeline gives you a bit of creative freedom that, as you said earlier, you wouldn’t have had, but how are you going to surprise the dedicated and longtime fans of the IP?

I think seeing some of the mechanics that are actually in the books come to life in the game. It’s a survival game, right? But there’s no trees to chop down, you know? So it’s like we do different things. And so I think, I described it once I said it’s very unique and it feels different from any kind of survival game I played.

I mean, we have a lot of rocks, don’t get me wrong, but our mechanics… You see the guy here, he’s literally sucking the dew off plants using this special scythe. It’s a completely different mechanic that you’ve never seen in a game before. And it’s from Dune.

In the Gamescom trailer and one thing that caught my attention… The Thumper summoning the Sandworm made me think of a Call of Duty *****, in the sense it looked like an end-of-game move. Is that the case?

No no no no no you can avoid it. You just get away from it, but if someone puts a Thumper down, you know a Sandworm’s going to come because it’s summoning them, right? So it takes time, and it’s like, okay, we have to get off this patch. And you really wouldn’t want to do it on a spice flow, unless it’s like a last resort, because then the spice is going to get eaten as well, so it won’t be there. It’s kind of like setting ***** to the gold, right, to stop people from getting it.

I don’t think it really fits with the game as it is. There are some ideas around how to make riding Sandworms more interesting,

Sure, it’s also nice and dramatic for the trailer right but the more interesting use of the thumper is actually when you’re harvesting Spice, the Sandworm is going to come because it hears the vibration, right? So you have people go out and place thumpers further away to draw it off so that you get more time to harvest, so that’s actually another way you use it you know so not just for murdering each other.

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Dune: Awakening’s gameplay features more than just base building. Image Credit: Funcom.

Another big and important facet of the game is vehicle building, so how are you managing to differentiate what you’re doing with that from other ship/vehicle/base-building games? How are you making it unique to Dune: Awakening?

I think the base building, it’s quite similar to what we did in Conan Exiles, except we’ve expanded on it and added more quality of life and cooperative stuff. For the vehicle building, I don’t know if any survival game does it quite the way we do with the module setup, and you can switch out different modules to have different… It’s like the sandbike, do you want an inventory on the back, a booster, or a second seat so you can bring a friend? I don’t know if it’s I don’t know if it’s that common like the survival games I played not many of them have vehicles as complex as ours.

So a big point to take away is that the vehicles can be heavily adapted to the task at hand?

Yeah, you can kit them out with scanners or lights, or if you want lasers so you can dogfight in the Ornithopters. I think one of them has a rocket turret, right, so you can get them to these kind of dogfighting sorts.

What other aspects of survival games are involved in Dune: Awakening that we may not necessarily know about as of yet?

So I think often survival games have a pretty interesting game loop where you’ll find areas that you can’t enter because of a particular hazard. So we have that. There’s an area of the world where a ship has crashed and it’s leaking radiation, and so there’s this whole area that’s covered in radiation. Which means you need to find ways to overcome the radiation.

I think that’s a kind of common survival game mechanic that you find. And we have some of those elements in the game as well like I have to overcome this challenge to get further into the world and explore this place.

Harvesting of resources is another big one, crafting, and building, that’s sort of pretty common in most survival games. I think the thing that we do differently is just that we’re trying to build this multiplayer end game. This ******* kind of scale. One of the premises, when we began, was ‘How do you give a survival game an end game’? Because a lot of survival games kind of peter out once you reach like “Oh, I’ve survived everything. I don’t have much more to do”.

And how have you done that?

So we created this political system with the Landsraad. We have the factions. The end game deep desert area [not the whole game it’s just one map] resets and the layout changes thanks to this Coriolis Storm. This big sandstorm comes through and destroys everything in the server in terms of buildings and locations and things like that.

Then the next time you go in there it’s a completely fresh map with a new layout. And then you remap it, explore it, find out where the dungeons are, find out where the points of interest are. Then in a week, that’s going to go away. So people go out there, they ****** over what’s there, but they know it’s temporary. And then it changes again. So it’s a fresh weekly update. That in itself is a new, almost a new game, a new mode. We call that infinite exploration right, like that part of the game.

Then we have this political system with the factions where there’s this sort of meta goals that they give you each week as well and then you kind of go and commit to doing these things for the factions and then you get to vote on an outcome. That outcome changes the server a little bit as well for the week. So it’s kind of two systems that work in tandem.

Factions, Spice Tax, and Cooperation Are Tantamount to Success

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Dune: Awakening’s vehicles can be a lifesaver, AND a much more useful method of transport than walking. Image Credit: Funcom.

The factions are a HUGE part of the source material, so because you mentioned outcomes, what examples are there of outcomes that you can vote on and how do they affect the factions?

Yeah, so if you go in the land, right, it might be that you encourage them to start a festival of knowledge on the planet, and then scholars come from other planets and suddenly your experience gets boosted by 33% if you’re in that faction. Or it might be that a special vendor arrives
and will only deal with members of that specific faction because you won the vote, right, to convince that vendor to only work with you.

I think it had maybe more to do with Tencent buying Funcom.

You can also make the spice tax go higher for the other factions so you can also have negative impacts on the other factions. You can make it so that they [other factions] get taxed *******, you can make it so that some of the safer areas are not as safe anymore and so much more.

Okay, so like it’s a constant tug of war.

Yes, yes. And you want to win the votes every week so that you can make the changes that are most advantageous to you and your faction.

And you’ve already touched upon Spice, how are you implementing it? You’ve already mentioned Spice Tax as well, which is one way I imagine, but how else are you implementing it in the universe of Dune: Awakening?

Yeah, so I mean Spice has these big spice blows that you need to go harvest. We’ve shown some of that in presentations. It’s kind of the backbone, the currency of the game. So you need it for paying taxes. You need it for crafting as well, as a lot of the items in the endgame require Spice to be infused with some of the things and you need it on a personal level as well, to power some of your abilities.

So is it like instead of some games where they have like 15 different materials that you need, Spice is the main one that will power a lot?

You still need a few others, but yeah, Spice is kind of, it’s like, if you need a particular type of metal, you probably also need Spice.

There’s nothing probably more iconic about Dune than sandworms, and last I knew you couldn’t interact with them in the sense of like rolling them or anything like that. Is that ever coming?

I mean, ever, yeah, for sure. Something we’ll do post-launch. But for right now, I don’t think it really fits with the game as it is. There are some ideas around how to make riding Sandworms more interesting, but I don’t think we want people to just get to the point where they can grab a Sandworm. Well, it’s also just like, what do they do with it? That, to me, is the more interesting question. Catching a worm and riding around on the sand, it’ll be fun for a while, but what are you actually doing with it?

So every vehicle serves a purpose in the game and Sandworms need to serve their purpose as well. We’ll get there but it’s just there are a couple of things to sort out first. I want to give them a unique purpose in the game.

Is there anything that you don’t usually get to share or nobody ever asks about Dune: Awakening that you’d like to?

I think we talk a lot about the survival game or the MMO game, but we never really talk about the game as an RPG or the feeling of the world. I think the game itself, like the games that I admire, is kind of the old Skyrim sort of thing. And I think when we try to build our world, we try to build something that feels like a world like they kind of do. Lived in.

You have Minecraft which is the ultimate sandbox but a lot of the games are like “This is the place and we don’t really care about what the place is we care about what you do in the place mechanically”.

In Dune: Awakening I really care about making it feel like a world, something that people can live in. To the point that there are radio stations you can tune into, and banter you can hear when you’re listening to bandits talk and things like that. Just making it feel like a real place. Stuff you don’t usually get in other survival games because their focus is understandably elsewhere.

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