Dune Awakening’s game director Joel Bylos says the survival game’s label became a “biggest challenge” during development, leading the studio to remove the MMO tag before release in a bid to reduce confusion. He argues the game’s progression—centered on craftin
When you’ve spent years building worlds inside online games, you learn quickly how much players lean on labels. For Dune Awakening, those labels became a problem the moment the project tried to explain itself.
Funcom is widely associated with MMOs, and Dune Awakening carries a familiar bundle: massively multiplayer, online, and an RPG. It also happens to be a survival game. That combination is exactly where game director Joel Bylos says development ran into its biggest description hurdles—especially once the team had “this online server setup. ” wanted “multiple maps. ” and felt the game’s structure was “quite complicated compared to most survival games.”.
In the early stages, the easiest explanation was also the least accurate one. Bylos says they ended up describing the game as an MMO “because we figured it was easy.” The MMO label didn’t just show up in early reveals—it stayed there until the lead-up to launch. when the team made a deliberate change.
Dune Awakening launched in June, and Bylos says Funcom dropped the MMO label in November. The reasoning was simple: the genre tag didn’t clarify anything, and confusion only deepened after it was removed. “I don’t think that helped either,” he said.
What makes the back-and-forth more frustrating is that Bylos and others working on Dune Awakening come from MMO backgrounds. Bylos was one of the lead designers on Funcom’s Age of Conan and a lead content designer on The Secret World. He also points to MMO “quirks” present in Conan Exiles and Dune Awakening—quirks that he says help shape those games’ distinctive loops.
But for him, the current framing still misses the point. “I don’t think it’s an MMO. ” he said. describing a “weird space” where the team tried to do “slightly more.” He argues the game’s connected world and a “big deep desert” where “lots of players” can go in is what makes it hard to categorize. especially because players often arrive with “a very set notion of what a genre is.”.
That’s why his message is blunt. “It’s not an MMO is my strong feeling right now,” he continued. “It’s definitely not.”
Bylos says the clearest place to see the split between MMO expectations and Dune Awakening’s reality is progression. Both World of Warcraft and Dune Awakening use level-based progression. but they pull the player through the game in different ways. WoW, in his description, focuses on quests. Dune Awakening, he says, focuses on crafting “to pull you through the game.”.
Even with that distinction, the director doesn’t pretend the explanation has landed cleanly. “Finding a way properly describe Dune: Awakening has been a ‘tough challenge’. and the studio still struggles with it.” He adds that many players still see the game as an MMORPG despite what he believes is a different core identity.
There are MMO elements still present, he acknowledged. But he insists that those elements don’t make it an MMO. “Yes,” he said, “there are MMO elements still, but as far as the game’s director is concerned, it’s not an MMO.”
Funcom is continuing work on the game’s upcoming console port, with improvements planned alongside new content. One practical change already taking shape is the recent split between PvE and PvP players into segregated groups. Bylos explains that separating them will allow the team to improve both sides more effectively. using “more focused data from players.”.
In other words: even after Funcom tried to correct the label before release, the work didn’t stop at branding. It’s moving forward in systems—while the debate over what Dune Awakening “really is” remains, in Bylos’s words, something the studio still struggles to settle.
Dune Awakening Joel Bylos Funcom MMO label survival game PvE PvP split crafting progression genre confusion