• 6 months ago
In Creating Worlds: From Book to Film to Game, Funcom takes us on a breathtaking journey into the heart of Arrakis, featuring never-before-seen footage from the game. Interviews with Greig Fraser, academy award-winning Cinematographer on Villeneuve’s Dune Part 1 and 2, and Funcom Creative Director, Joel Bylos, reveal the creative overlap between Dune: Awakening and the recent movies. Get a glimpse at what it takes to bring the ultimate Dune fantasy to life.

Dune: Awakening combines the grit and creativity of survival games with the social interactivity of a large, persistent multiplayer game to create a unique and ambitious open-world survival MMO. Dune: Awakening is more sandbox than theme park. The emphasis lies in the freedom it offers in choosing and pursuing your goals, and the emergent moments that arise as they clash with that of other players.

In Creating Worlds, Joel Bylos summed up the meaning of Dune: Awakening, "Funcom as a company has been on this journey for a long time, creating multiplayer worlds where players can live out their dreams and fantasies. We were there in the beginning with massively multiplayer online games. We’ve been there in the beginning with survival open-world crafting games, and Dune: Awakening is a culmination of those legacies, bringing us forward into the future. It’s a culmination of what Funcom means as a company and what we can deliver."

Dune: Awakening will come to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Sign up to the Beta now at https://www.duneawakening.com and wishlist the game on Steam.

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Note: The #DuneAwakening #Trailer is courtesy of Funcom and LEGENDARY ENTERTAINMENT. All Rights Reserved. The https://amzo.in are with a purchase nothing changes for you, but you support our work. #XboxViewTV publishes game news and about Xbox and PC games and hardware.
Transcript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 Arrakis is this unrelenting anvil
00:05 against which people are beaten, shaped, and forged
00:08 into something that's stronger.
00:12 There's something very spiritual about that sand, which
00:15 on the surface is really nothing,
00:16 but underneath has a really diverse biological backstory.
00:21 One of my favorite lines from Frank Herbert
00:27 is, when you end a novel, it's like a train
00:29 coming into the station that doesn't stop.
00:32 You just jam on the brakes and let the sparks
00:34 fly into people's imagination.
00:35 Arrakis is a test, is what the Fremen say.
00:46 And the player comes right into the heart of that test
00:49 due to awakenings of survival game at the base level.
00:52 And it begins like a traditional survival game.
00:55 You're looking for water.
00:56 You're looking for shelter.
00:58 Where will you find water in the desert?
01:00 Will you take it from others?
01:02 So when we talk about survival, sure,
01:04 we start with the basic kind of survival, survive.
01:07 And then when you've survived long enough,
01:09 it's now time to think about political survival
01:11 and how you progress within the universe.
01:15 The approach we take when building a world like Arrakis
01:18 is we kind of have to think about,
01:20 where are the stark lines?
01:21 And how do we draw these epic spaces?
01:23 How do we make them feel huge?
01:25 And the player feels dwarfed by everything
01:27 they see around them.
01:28 The intention was every time we saw the desert,
01:31 it was highly brutal.
01:32 And if you went out into the desert
01:34 without the right protection and without the right knowledge,
01:37 that it was sure death.
01:38 If we looked at references from some of the hottest
01:40 deserts in the world, the visuals
01:42 that we saw from those deserts weren't enough.
01:45 We needed this world to be even harsher.
01:48 So we've been working with Legendary
01:50 since the very beginning.
01:51 They've been very generous with sharing with us
01:53 assets from the film and allowing
01:55 us to see things from the film and allowing us to really
01:57 understand the vision that Denis Villeneuve has
02:00 for the world and his characters and the way
02:02 he's grounding Arrakis.
02:03 But of course, a game is a much larger scale.
02:07 So we need to expand upon that vision.
02:09 We have our own army of concept artists
02:11 who are sending things back and forth
02:12 with Legendary all the time.
02:14 One of my best moments on this project so far,
02:16 actually, was I got to go and visit
02:18 the set of the first film with a group of the people
02:21 from Funcom, the art directors, the lead artists.
02:25 And we got to walk around in the actual sets
02:28 that they had built in classic old school set building,
02:31 massive palaces.
02:33 And we got to look at the ornithopters
02:35 from the inside and the outside.
02:36 We got to walk around them and get a sense of their scale.
02:40 Well, I think what they had done really well
02:43 is they'd been quite inspired by the world
02:45 that we had built in Dune Part 1.
02:48 Now, on a film, you're sort of led on a journey
02:50 by the director and by the script, whereas in a game,
02:53 you have the opportunity to sort of create your own narrative
02:55 and create your own journey.
02:57 The most exciting aspect for me is the fact
02:59 that you can take what you've enjoyed and loved,
03:02 and you can build your own stories and your own places.
03:05 And that, to me, is the ultimate goal,
03:07 is to have complete control.
03:10 Using Unreal 5 to create a game is obviously
03:14 one of the better choices.
03:15 Unreal 5 gives us flexibility through the blueprinting system.
03:19 It allows us to handle amazing graphics
03:22 through the rendering system, the lighting system,
03:24 such as Lumen.
03:24 Lumen technology allows proper light bouncing.
03:27 If I had to say one thing in the game that really benefits
03:29 from Lumen, it's player-crafted spaces.
03:32 In our case, it's like you build a room, and you place a window,
03:36 and the window lets in natural light,
03:38 and the light will fill the room in a way that feels real.
03:42 And that technology hasn't existed before.
03:45 Before Unreal 5, in the olden days,
03:47 you had to use what we called the LOD system.
03:49 And that meant that you had to create assets
03:51 at different LOD levels so it doesn't slow down
03:53 everybody's computer.
03:54 With Unreal 5, we have this new technology called Nanite
03:57 that breaks things down into the right amount of polygons
03:59 at the right distance.
04:00 So for us, as a company, this has made an amazing difference
04:03 to the visual detail of the world.
04:05 It allows us to create one really amazing-looking cliff
04:08 piece, for example.
04:09 And then it doesn't matter how far away or how close we place
04:12 it, it performs well, and it looks great.
04:14 Where Unreal worked for us on June
04:20 was that it was a fantastic pre-production and planning
04:23 tool.
04:24 On June part 2, we had some very complicated scenes.
04:27 And we were able to pre-vis all the way from Budapest
04:31 what the light was going to be doing well in advance.
04:34 It's the only tool that I've used,
04:36 I would say, in my 25 years of shooting
04:39 that is able to be used across a wide spectrum of films
04:43 by different types of filmmakers.
04:48 The most iconic creature in the June universe
04:52 is the sandworm of Arrakis.
04:54 And so we've tried to represent this in the game
04:56 in multiple ways.
04:57 So as a player, your first steps on the open sand,
05:00 you hear the hiss of the sand in the distance
05:03 as a sandworm begins to move towards you.
05:06 And when it gets close, you hear the roar
05:08 as it erupts from the sand nearby.
05:10 And at that point, you have only seconds
05:13 to live if you cannot make it to rocky ground.
05:15 So this is your first experience with sandworms.
05:17 And these are the little ones.
05:19 When you go into the deep desert,
05:21 when you're harvesting spice,
05:23 the giant ring-mouthed sandworms that we've seen in the film
05:26 will erupt underneath the spice blows
05:28 and suck harvesters and equipment
05:30 down into the sand beneath them.
05:31 There's really only one rule.
05:33 The sandworm will always come.
05:35 Humans have always had this innate drive
05:43 to create something, to build worlds,
05:46 whether it's in their head,
05:47 whether it's in text,
05:48 whether it's on screens,
05:50 whether it's in games.
05:51 Funcom as a company has been on this journey
05:54 for a long time, creating multiplayer worlds
05:56 where players can live out their dreams and fantasies.
05:59 We were there in the beginning
06:00 with massively multiplayer online games.
06:02 We've been there in the beginning
06:04 with survival open-world crafting games.
06:06 And Dune is a combination of those legacies,
06:09 bringing us forward into the future.
06:11 It's the culmination of what Funcom means as a company
06:14 and what we can deliver.
06:15 And this legacy means that we need to really pay attention
06:18 to what we're creating and how we create it for the fans.
06:22 Because I think at the heart of this,
06:24 there's a lot of people out there
06:25 who really want to live in the universe
06:27 that Frank Herbert created.
06:28 And they really want to live in the visual world
06:31 of the films that they see from Villeneuve.
06:33 And so we need to create the gap
06:36 between those two possibility spaces
06:38 and create a game world where people can live out
06:40 their fantasies that they've taken from Dune.
06:42 And yes, it's a huge legacy
06:44 and it feels at times extremely overwhelming,
06:47 but we really hope that we can deliver something
06:49 for everybody.
06:50 (dramatic music)
06:53 (dramatic music)
06:55 (dramatic music)
06:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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