Bethesda’s Starfield Should Have Taken Notes from Dune: Awakening’s Epic World Building

The Dune MMO is real, and it’s happening. In the recent State of Unreal live stream, we got a ton more details regarding Awakening, including the game’s environments. It’s already generating praise for looking very promising and might be just what the Starfield-shaped holes in our hearts need.

The creative director, Joel Bylos, sheds light on the careful process behind translating the franchise’s immersive world into video game format.

Dune: Awakening’s Procedurally Generated Environments Already Surpass Starfield

When transitioning from literature to film and finally to gaming, the team behind Awakening needed to shift from a structured narrative to a player-driven sandbox experience. This required creating expansive possibility spaces within the game’s world, encouraging discovery, exploration, and survival.

Unreal Engine’s Blueprint system proved critical in setting up sandbox interactions within the game. This system allowed the team to define various gameplay mechanics and interactions, giving players much freedom. Additionally, the engine’s world-leading renderer allowed for stunning visuals, ensuring that every aspect of the landscape was visually captivating.

Thanks to Nanite technology, the team could use high-polygon models at any distance within the game, providing players with immersive environments to explore. To generate these landscapes, the team employed Houdini with Unreal, using a non-destructive workflow that allowed for sculpting and regeneration without causing issues.

Recognizing the importance of realistic sand dynamics in capturing the essence of the movie’s desert setting, the team used Unreal plugins such as Fluid Ninja. This allowed for sand displacement technology, which reacts to small details like footprints from a player’s walk or run.

The Lumen lighting system enhanced the visual fidelity of both exteriors and interiors, combining global illumination and bounce lighting to create stunning environments.

One of Starfield‘s biggest problems was its procedurally generated environments. They seemed hollow, empty, and devoid of much to do, and they eventually all ended up looking like rehashes of each other. With the direction the MMO is taking, we could finally be getting what we hoped Bethesda’s game had given us.

And from what we have seen so far, it seems that Dune: Awakening will surpass Bethesda’s less-than-satisfactory RPG with its gorgeous and detailed environments.

How the Upcoming Sci-Fi MMO Came to Be

From the outset, Bylos expressed his lifelong fascination with Frank Herbert’s Dune universe—one that was only magnified by the epic cinematic adaptation we got from the Warner Brothers.

Funcom, an independent game developer, and publisher, was nothing less than eager to translate the already rich foundation of the franchise’s universe into an open-world survival MMO.

The collaboration with WB was important for gaining invaluable insights. The game’s development team was able to explore the movie sets and absorb the franchise’s essence.

Greg Frasier, the Oscar-winning cinematographer for Part One, plays a key role in shaping the game’s visual language, so we can expect a smooth transition from the movies.

Are you excited for the sci-fi MMO? Let us know why or why not in the comments below!