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00:00Master Arrakis, and it will open your mind. This is your path to Awakening.
00:12Hello, my name is Joel Bylos and I'm the Creative Director in Funcom Oslo and we're working on Dune Awakening.
00:18Dune Awakening is a survival game on a massive scale. It's first and foremost a great Dune game
00:24and then we layer in the survival elements that make a lot of sense because Arrakis is the most dangerous planet in the universe.
00:29So you'll be dodging sandstorms, sandworms, you know, hostile scavengers on the planet, avoiding Sadakar dropships.
00:36And you know, playing through the game as you level up and try to uncover this great conspiracy that's happening in the Imperium.
00:42We've just dropped the game so it's live from the 5th for people who pre-ordered and got the head start.
00:48And of course we released yesterday our launch trailer which is obviously giving people a good taste of what it's like to choose a side and fight for Arrakis.
00:57The first thing you need to know about Dune Awakening's story is it takes place in an alternate timeline.
01:02In this universe, Jessica, Atreides, gave birth to a daughter instead of a son. So Paul Atreides does not exist.
01:08And the game kind of explores the consequences of that decision.
01:11And so you as a player, you start out as a prisoner on a prison transport bound for a place called Neo-Karthag.
01:18And your prison ship gets shot down. And you land in this shipwreck, you get rescued from the shipwreck by a mysterious stranger.
01:26And that's kind of where your journey begins in the game.
01:29And then as you explore the story, you basically go out with this task, find the Fremen.
01:34And you're trying to figure out what has happened to the native people of Arrakis, where they've gone and why.
01:39So right now, one of the most exciting things for me is just tuning in to people running livestreams and watching people slowly get eaten by worms as they tear their way across the desert.
01:48I think it's because you're standing still. So after it goes up, you gotta... Oh, oh! Oh god! Oh god! Oh god!
01:58It's a super exciting moment. And there's a lot of ways to die in Arrakis, so it's kind of fun watching people die in all various different ways.
02:05One of the ways you can die without paying attention is if you walk into a cave and you're like, oh, there's nobody here.
02:10And then you step on one of the traps on the floor. Suddenly there's a cloud of poison gas.
02:14The other one that I really like, and it's kind of nasty of us as game developers, is when you're cruising across the desert in your nice, newly built sand bike.
02:22And you hit a patch of quicksand. And you get too far into it to get out.
02:26The obvious inspirations for the game are obviously, you know, we've got the Villeneuve movies, the books by Frank Herbert, the extended universe by Brian Herbert.
02:34But I think like some of the other Dune media that has inspired us, right?
02:39Like there's the games, the Cryo game from 92 and obviously Dune 2, the RTS.
02:44And you can actually listen to the music from those games in our game on the radio station, which is pretty cool.
02:50And then I think like one of the things that I really was inspired by is just if you've ever seen the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune about how he wanted to take this psychedelic approach.
03:00And I think people will find that when they take a little spice in our game, there's a little more going on than they might expect.
03:05I like to refer back to the actual writing of Frank Herbert because there's a scene in the book where Paul is in an ornithopter and they ask Liet Kynes,
03:13what would you do if you were trapped in the desert?
03:15And he says very simple, check the integrity of my steel suit, stick to rocky ground to avoid the sandworms.
03:22And if you're very careful and stay out of the storms, you can make your way out of the desert.
03:26And that's kind of how I would expect people to start our game.
03:29Get equipped, check the integrity of your gear and make sure that you're getting water, stick to rocky ground and slowly make your way to civilization.
03:37Who are you? You've heard the expression, the spice must flow. I am the man who ensures that it continues to do so.
03:47Because Dune Awakening is a massively multiplayer kind of game, you want to be playing with friends and you probably want to set up different roles for your friends group.
03:55So I would personally, if I was working with people, I'd have someone who's the builder and their job is to actually set up the base.
04:01They can place out blueprints and then other people in the group can fill them in.
04:04So then that comes into the second role, who's the person who's the gatherer.
04:07The gatherer's job is to go around and mine different resources in the world, abandon vehicles, pick up stone,
04:13pick up different types of scrap metal and bring them back to base so that you can craft.
04:17Then I'd have someone who's the scout. The scout's job is exploration.
04:21We have this cool mechanic in the game called surveying where you climb to high places and place out a survey probe and it will reveal fog of war across an area.
04:29And the other cool part of that is that you can then craft a chart and share that chart with your friends.
04:34So your friends will then be able to get access to the maps that you make.
04:37So that's the third role. And then the fourth role, of course, is defender slash combat role.
04:43And that's the person who's going out killing people, taking their blood and bringing it back to base so that you can turn it into water.
04:49We aren't going into too much detail about post-launch, but there's one thing I've promised the fans that I can tell them is going to come down the road,
04:55and that is riding sandworms.
04:57Dune Awakening is out now for those who pre-ordered on Steam on PC.
05:11It is coming on June 10th for people who purchased through Steam on PC.
05:16And it will be coming to consoles at a later date.