Dune: Awakening
There hadn't been anything new in terms of video game adaptations of Dune for a long time, but Denis Villeneuve's film adaptations breathed new life into the desert planet of Arrakis. It was only with Dune: Spice Wars (2022) that Shiro Games released a 4X RTS, but now Funcom, with the support of Nukklear and Yager, is inviting players to take part in a large-scale open-world action-survival massively multiplayer online game.
Survival in the desert was already a central theme in Funcom's Conan Exiles. Released in Early Access in 2017, the online multiplayer survival game was originally only meant to fund the next project, but instead became the biggest success in the company's history and unexpectedly turned into a service game. The next project from Norway's largest game company, wholly owned by Tencent, is also set in a desert, on the desert planet Dune or Arrakis. Dune: Awakening is an open-world multiplayer survival game in a persistent world with social hubs such as Arrakeen and Harko Village, server-wide politics and a cinematic storyline that is not typical of an MMO, although PvP is always optional.