Frank Herbert’s Dune has one of the best universes in fiction, a lived-in world with many moving parts, cultures, and institutions. The problem is that the world of Dune is kind of stagnant until the first book when the plot against House Atreides really changes the whole universe — which had been stagnant for a millennium. That means that telling other stories in that universe and not featuring Paul will inevitably feel a bit unimportant because they can’t really change anything at a large scale.
This is terrible news for a video game because you want the players to feel important, to feel like they’re making an impact, but you can’t have them be Muad’Dib, at least not when you have hundreds of players on the same map. That is one of the big issues Dune: Awakening faced: how to bring players to the world of Dune without interrupting the canon of Paul’s rise to power.
Get BWT in your inbox!
Get BWT in your inbox!
During a presentation shortly before a hands-on press preview for the new survival MMO, Creative Director Joel Bylos talked about how the team reconsidered their approach to the franchise and came to the idea of an alternate timeline. In the world of Dune: Awakening, Lady Jessica chose to give birth to a daughter, and Paul Atreides was never born, meaning Muad’Dib never led the Fremen to a jihad.
This has huge repercussions for the version of Arrakis players find in Dune: Awakening, as not only does Muad’Dib not exist, but the Fremen are completely gone, which makes for the most intriguing aspect of Dune: Awakening.
You see, the game doesn’t just brush away that the Fremen aren’t in the game, it is the whole main point of the story. Your character is sent to Arrakis specifically to find the missing Fremen, who Imperium propaganda wants you to believe have been exterminated. It is their absence that impacts every moment and every aspect of the game.
Dune: Awakening distinguishes itself from the movie, and finds an opportunity in doing so.
In the six or so hours I got to play Dune: Awakening, you are constantly encountering bits and pieces of Fremen culture that are essential to surviving in the desert, but the fact that there are no Fremen to teach you is part of the thrill of this survival game. Sure, you can build a stillsuit on your own, but you don’t know how to do the Sandwalk because you have no point of reference for it.
Most importantly, by making the act of finding the Fremen the main quest and their whereabouts a mystery, Dune: Awakening makes it a point to have the player slowly explore and learn about the Fremen in a more comprehensive way than any previous adaptation of the books. Though you are not on Arrakis to lead the Fremen into another jihad, you do learn about their traditions and their religion, exploring abandoned Fremen dwellings filled with murals and carvings.
Most importantly, without going into spoilers, Dune: Awakening manages to pull from other books in the series (like Children of Dune) and explore the very origin of the Fremen as the Wondering Zensunni. By skipping the traditional story of raising a Fremen army from the book and movies but instead making the Fremen a goal you should pursue while learning about them, Dune: Awakening is both respecting the lore and providing a fascinating and entirely new way to experience this franchise.
Granted, it is entirely possible that you do end up finding the Fremen later in the game (again, given how few Fremen the Harkonnens believed were on Arrakis, it is very possible they killed a sietch or two and thought that was it). But for now, based on the first few hours of the game, Dune: Awakening‘s biggest limitation might just be its biggest strength.
