Dune survival MMO had to go to the author's family to get permission to cut "ridiculous" sandwalking and the book's extremely explosive shields

Mar. 5, 2024

Dozens of shields detonating like mini nukes would’ve been a problem

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

Dune Awakeninghad to make some changes to its source material, and the developers needed express permission to make that happen.

For one, Dune Awakening won’t have the typical ‘sandwalking’ we see Paul, Jessica, and the Fremen doing to avoid attracting the huge sandworms. In the books, characters walk in deliberately weird patterns, dragging their feet and hopping between spots in irregular movements, so as to not send regular vibrations through the sand on Arrakis and draw the worms to them.

Awakening’s creative director Joel Bylos tellsPC Gamerthat having sandwalking in Awakening “looked ridiculous,” and made players “walk really slowly.” I can imagine having dozens of players in one game all sandwalking in odd patterns would also be pretty unintentionally hilarious, which probably isn’t the vibe Dune Awakening is going for.

Another huge problem for Dune Awakening comes via the Holtzman shields - the personal shields that troops like the Harkonnen soldiers and the Sardaukar use for protection. The shields are great for protecting against weapons like knives - as Feyd Rautha proves in Dune Part Two - but if they get hit by a lasgun blast, they basically detonate like mini nuclear bombs.

Now imagine MMO players firing lasguns at each other’s shields, and you can see the problem. Again, Bylos explains toPC Gamerthat Dune Awakening actually changes this little bit of intricate Dune lore for the upcoming game. “In our story there’s an incident with a lasgun and a shield that occurred and from that point on, all CHOAM-imported lasguns to the planet now have a safety built in so they cannot target a shield. So if you aim a lasgun at a shield in our game, it just turns the lasgun off automatically,” Bylos says.

Dune Awakening’s developers had to go to Warner Bros. and the Herbert family themselves to get permission to change this. “We discussed this, we went through it with our partners at Legendary and the Herberts as well, and got their sign-off so we could do it this way,” Bylos continues. “We had this prototype which was kind of like Ghostbusters where they cross the stream and everything gets unstable, the lasgun starts to shake and the two players explode in nuclear explosions, but it just felt a little tacky unfortunately.”

Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter

Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more

There’s still no release date for Dune Awakening, but the good news if that Funcom’s survival MMO is in closed beta right now, so it’s at least in a playable state. Read up on our fullDune Awakening previewto see what we made of the new game, and whether it can help make the gap between Part Two andDune 3much less painful.

You can also read up on our guide to thebest survival gamesavailable right now if you’re looking for something to sink your time into.

A mysterious Palworld update appears to make a change designed to get around the survival game’s legal battle with Nintendo

Five years later, PUBG creator PlayerUnknown finally reveals his massive open-world survival game projects, aiming for “realistic worlds thousands of kilometers wide” across three games

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 first reactions are in, and they’re glowing: “It’s the closest Hollywood has made to a Dragon Ball movie”