Your Own Adventure in Arrakis – Preview

Spoilers: Sometimes you see them coming from a mile away and sometimes they sneak up without you realizing it. how? Well, it didn’t occur to me until I was writing this preview that the whole approach to Dune: Awakening is actually a spoiler for the Dune movies. That’s why this warning is in order: if you still want to watch the movies, especially the second one, it’s best not to read any information about Dune: Awakening. The game is separate from the movies, but its setting is clearly similar to the movies and books. If you prefer to receive it without prior knowledge, it is best to skip this preview.

What if the tongue of the unseen did not exist? What if Paul Atreides’ mother had listened to her orders and given birth to a daughter instead of the son she had? The trailer for The Dune: Awakening asks this question and outlines an alternate timeline for the planet Arrakis, where the story of the Dune films and books largely takes place. Fortunately, I’d already seen these movies, but it didn’t occur to me until later that this premise was pretty annoying if you haven’t seen the movies yet. After all, the question of whether Paul Atreides is the Tongue of the Unseen is a central plot point in the second film or the first book. The trailer for The Dune: Awakening immediately reveals that Paul Atreides is indeed the tongue of the unseen… and therefore absent from Dune: Awakening.

Atreides, Harkonnen, Sardokar, and not the Fremen?

Dune: The Awakening is all about you. It’s an mmog game in which you create your own character and you have to make a name for yourself on Arrakis with that character. You can do this in all kinds of ways and in cooperation with different factions. Alternative history, without the tongue of the unseen, changes a lot for Arrakis. For example, the Atreides were never eliminated, and are on the planet alongside Harkonnen, while Sardaukar’s Imperial forces are also on the planet. After all, Arrakis itself has not changed: the planet is still very important for its spices. So the fact that different factions are fighting for control of the planet has not changed. What’s different is that the Fremen appear to have been exterminated in this version, because other factions were present on the planet in greater numbers. Note the word “appears”, because in the demo I attended it wasn’t clear whether you would encounter the Fremen in later stages or in other places. However, initially they will not play a role in Dune: Awakening.