It’s hard to think of a science fiction universe as inseparable from its canon as Dune. And yet at the same time, it’s a universe where so much can vary from one interpretation to the next (as you’ll be swiftly reminded any time you catch a stray set photo of a greased-up Sting.)
Dune: Awakening reviewDeveloper: FuncomPublisher: FuncomAvailability: Out TBC on PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X/S
With that in mind it probably makes a lot of sense for Dune: Awakening, the survival MMO from Conan: Exiles developer Funcom, to take its “alternate history” approach. Dune: Awakening takes place “a few years” before the events of the books, but those events are entirely different timelines, with Awakening imagining a scenario where a “significant moment” in the books, where someone makes a decision of some kind, is decided differently.
Joel Bylos, Funcom’s chief creative officer and creative director on Dune: Awakening, was coy about what decision that was, let alone what the consequences of it might be. “It’s not Paul that makes the decision,” he would at least say, referring to protagonist Paul Atreides. This was after I’d asked whether it might be his drinking of the Water of Life that decision was referring to – the moment where Atreides effectively chooses the path of war in Frank Herbert’s novels, and now Denis Villeneuve’s films.
“Things are slightly different in our universe. Many events are still the same, so it’s not like we’ve gone all ‘thousands of years ago, a rock slid in the wrong place and changed everything’. It’s just a few years back. But the significant thing – it’s really close to spoiler territory, which I can’t really go through – but let’s just say that for the large part, we sort of sidestep religion.”
Dune Awakening Survive Arrakis Trailer 4K Watch on YouTube
At this point I can hear the Dune nerds’ alarm bells ringing. The Dune Encyclopedia’s also out, while we’re on the subject, which means no biologically-powered machines, but while that’s “not exactly canonical” in the eyes of Funcom and the Herbert estate anyway, Dune is in many ways nothing without religion. It’s a series built on, amongst other things, a borrowing of Islamic themes, and is very explicitly engaged with the complexities of religious war. One of the books is quite literally called Dune: Messiah. But it’s worth pausing the concern for at least a minute.