Dune: Awakening‘s new single-player mode could be a great way to experience the MMO-survival mashup’s story by yourself, but don’t jump in expecting a The Last of Us replacement.
Developer Funcom has been hard at work translating its beloved online game into a single-player context, with a new mode coming out alongside Dune: Awakening’s console release later this month.
We asked chief creative officer Joel Bylos about what fans should expect from the new mode in an interview from Gamescom – and if would-be lone wolves will get what they’re looking for in Arrakis.
“I think if people play the game [this month] and what they’re looking for is a really great survival game experience that they can play single-player, that’ll be no issue,” Bylos tells us. “If they expect it to be like The Last of Us, they’re probably barking at the wrong tree, right? So, I think, if their expectations are correct for what kind of genre it is and what type of game it is, they’ll be perfectly satisfied.”
The ability to journey through Funcom’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s beloved novels has apparently been a long-requested feature from fans, but it’s also a feature that’s been quite hard to make. “Transforming a persistent, server-authoritative, open-world survival game with multiple maps into a smooth local experience is no small feat, and today, we want to talk about the technical work our team has done to enable solo survival on Arrakis,” the studio wrote earlier this summer.
A blog post from the studio explained a little more about everything that has to change to accommodate for solo journeys. Translating multiplayer-centric features, balancing combat or resource harvest rates, and making your machines handle the “heavy lifting” are just a few of the changes Funcom had to make for solo sand lovers.