It’s impossible to miss Dune: Awakening at this year’s PAX East in Boston. How could you when there’s a massive sandworm coming up out of the exhibition floor? Shai-Hulud stands out even at a massive expo hall. The dozens and dozens of stations offering fans an early chance to play the game help, too. That’s what I got to do when I stopped by during the convention’s first day. I’m not very experienced with open-world games, but I certainly know Arrakis. And playing Dune: Awakening was like being on Frank Herbert’s iconic planet. It was also like stepping into one of Denis Villeneuve’s movies. (Which is why I intentionally got myself eaten by a sandworm within three minutes, a truly incredible visceral experience thanks to the vibrating gaming chair I was using.)
How did Funcom not only recreate in vivid detail and depth one of the most legendary planets in pop culture history but also make it a massive, absolutely stunning place you can explore yourself? Once I finished up with my demo at PAX East, I sat down with Dune: Awakening‘s Senior Art Director Gavin Whelan to talk about the challenges of bringing the most dangerous planet in the galaxy to consoles. Turns out sand is just as tough on developers as it is for offworlders.
(Note: Funcom developed Dune: Awakening with Legendary Entertainment, which also produces Villeneuve’s films. Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital.)
Nerdist: I just played Dune: Awakening and thought it was gorgeous. How much of the inspiration for how the game looks is from the books vs. the movies vs. your own creation?
Gavin Whelan: The movies were the first real (inspiration), because we worked so closely with Legendary. They flew a bunch of us down to the movie set. So it was very hard not to be influenced by this stuff. And we were getting concept art from them constantly. Then it was working both ways. We were sending work to them and getting their take on it, making sure that tonally we were correct.
The books, of course, were central. From the design perspective, it was always, “Make your designs fit Dune, not the other way around. Don’t try to cram the Bene Gesserit into this thing.” No, it’s, “This is the way they are in the books,” and you have to try as best you can to make a game out of this. And to try to stay as true to the books as possible while taking the story on a different route to avoid the obvious problem of having Paul (Atreides) being the principal actor. We had that with Conan Exiles, where many people asked, “Can you play as Conan?” No, sorry. You can’t do that. You have to be somebody else. “Am I important?” Not really. And we try to create an interesting backstory.
I don’t want to give spoilers here. It’s kind of cool. I think there’s a lot of interest in there as you grow and as you play the game. There’s a lot of mystery.
I know you don’t want to ruin any of the mystery, but what’s your favorite part of the Dune: Awakening that you can talk about? Whether that’s how something looks, how you designed something, a certain gameplay aspect, etc.
Whelan: I’m on the artistic side, so any chance to be artistic is useful and fun for me. So, building is the part where I think people can be really expressive. We had the brutalist architecture, we had a vision of the way the world was, and we were trying to create something that feels like it belongs in Arrakis. And then you see what the players are doing in the beta and how they took things and just these amazing architects. They just went crazy in different directions. It was really, really interesting, really fun to see. Actually, I was super relieved when I saw people doing crazy stuff with the buildings.
When you play Dune: Awakening, you’re there on Arrakis, which I expected. But the first thing that awed me happened when I was randomly scrolling around the screen. I scrolled up, and all of a sudden, there was a giant Spacing Guild ship there. I just wasn’t expecting that. What aspects of the game that are not directly in your face or obvious do you think are real standouts in the game?
Whelan: I always say it’s a sci-fi game, it’s a sci-fi world. You need to have something in the sky that does something interesting. So those big ships were really something I was pushing to get in there from day one. And to use that 50% of the screen to say something, but not be in your face, just to be subtle. So you get that sense that there’s a bigger universe out there.
Having the Heighliner there, as well, is also important. There are connections.
And also for players, we look at the areas of importance. “What is important to you?” That sort of scale, that circle that you can build around the player of how important that area is. When you first start, it’s like 20 feet away from you. “Where can I get water? How can I survive this? Where can I get shelter from the sun? From a storm?” As you build, as you expand your knowledge, and as you get stronger, these circles increase in size and you become more aware of the world around you. You come into contact with larger, major factions, other players, other guilds that are growing. So we just want to keep pushing things upwards and outwards.
I don’t know if you got to use any of the vehicles…
No, I was just running around as a player. I didn’t get to try any of the vehicles.
Whelan: That’s one of the things I’m really proud of and amazed by. This is a whole team effort. It’s not just our thing, it’s how that level of interest is maintained as you get up to the point where you have an ornithopter. And you’re flying across the massive areas, because we had that challenge with Conan Exiles to a degree, when it was just a horse and a map. All of a sudden it felt small and you could travel from one point to another. How do you still maintain that sort of scale of world and interest and just keep on building upwards and upwards? That was the challenge.
What was the single biggest challenge in terms of design or making your vision a reality for Dune: Awakening?
Whelan: Design was always challenging. Sand is incredibly hard to get right.
Tough planet!
Whelan: It’s a tough planet and there’s a lot of it. :whispers: I hate sand. No, I love sand, but you have to get it right. And the sand deformation, the way the sandworm interacts with the world. I always start by apologizing to the VFX artist because we threw so many things at them. It’s like, “Okay, sandworms, yes. Big deforming sand, lots of sand effects. And can we have a sandstorm? And can we have ornithopters flying and can we have spice that blows?”
The list kept on going, just massive big effects we threw at the game, all these things happening at the same time. You have this big purple column of spice exploding up, and a sandworm is moving across it. Then you have the storm behind it. Ornithopters just flying around and explosions going off. These are things you just don’t want to do in a game normally and have these big massive VFX effects. But it needed to be big, though. It’s a big world, and you need to be able to see these things from a distance.
You talked about how the books are so important to the game. I’m sure you thought a lot about Frank Herbert while you were making the game.
Whelan: Yeah.
Is there an aspect of the game you think he’d be most happy or impressed by? I know I’m asking you to answer for someone who can’t, but I just wonder if you’ve thought, “Wow, I wish I could show him this.“
Whelan: I don’t know. That’s a really…I am struggling to actually answer that one, because I’m scared to actually think what he would think.
It’s probably more on the narrative and story side. Because the book also reads like an internal monologue, and that’s very hard to do in a game setting. So I think it’s the way we build upon the world that he created. And, of course we’re in contact with the Herbert estate. We communicate with them a lot. But I still think it’d be interesting.
I don’t know how people would react to that, though. “I made this thing. This is mine.” Then somebody else is coming on, making version two, three, four of this? It’s like giving a movie license to somebody else, and they take it and go in a slightly different direction. I would like to think he would be happy to see what we’ve done with it, but I’m also scared.
That’s the blend of joy and terror I have working on this license. It is a very important thing for many people, and you have to respect that. You’ve seen with David Lynch in the past, how things can go wrong with something where everybody has an opinion or a vision or a viewpoint of this. So there are risks involved. And I knew it was going to be a challenge. It was never going to be an easy planet to bring to life with the politics, and to build a game around this that feels compelling. But hopefully, we’ve made a world in which the player is that missing part. The unexpected variant that comes in and changes things, and it can take Dune: Awakening in different directions.
I’m sure you’ve talked about Dune: Awakening a lot now with a lot of people. What’s something nobody’s asked you about yet that you’re just itching to talk about that you haven’t yet?
Whelan: It’s the stuff I can’t answer. It’s the stuff in the future and where the story goes, and the twists and the turns. But also, how we expand beyond just this endless desert game. And I always drop in these kind of little things like, “Oh, there’s a Heighliner in the sky. It’s a shame not to use it,” as bait.
I would love you to ask me what planets we’re going to, and I can’t answer because we do have a few things in mind, and we’re writing for that now. It’s a big universe. The second movie ended with Paul flying off into space. We want to bring the players places. We want to take them on those journeys. There’s a lot of scope in this story to keep on going for years really.
Are you talking about expansions to Dune: Awakening or are you talking about sequels?
Whelan: I’d say expansions. When you go to a sequel, you have a risk of losing players at that point. And you just want to keep on building. They own [the game] at that point. You just need to keep on feeding them new experiences all the time. Give them something new to play with and, not keep them happy, but see what they’re doing with it and try to adapt to that as much as possible.
Because the moment you release a game, it doesn’t matter how serious your view of the game is. On The Secret World, some guy half-naked riding a bicycle with a cowboy hat on was the first thing I saw in the game. And I thought, “Okay, well, he’s doing his thing, he’s making his world his way.”
With the building competition we had, where players were making giant sand worm buildings and giant scorpions, the players will add that unexpected twist. You never know what they’re going to do with the world. I’d love to sort of think it’s a very easy, single narrow path, but they will go in different directions. But I think players still want to have that Dune fantasy at the core of it. They want to have that experience.
We want to push people in different directions. I wanted to play as an Atreides, but by the end, I was a Harkonnen. I don’t know how that happened. So we will see where people go, and it’s going to be fun to watch them go that way. Certainly, when we’ve been doing tests, the amount of interest we get when we see the map and see where players are traveling and how they’re exploring and what they’re unlocking and what they’re doing, it’s really fascinating to watch.
Dune: Awakening comes to PC on June 10, 2025.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist who isn’t afraid of the fear virus. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.
The post DUNE: AWAKENING Senior Art Director Gavin Whelan Talks Creating Arrakis at PAX East appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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