It’s 2026 and Dune Awakening is trying to convince everyone that it’s not an MMORPG again
You know, I’m beginning to suppose that both interviewers love baiting Funcom about Dune Awakening’s MMORPG standing, or Funcom actually loves baiting MMORPG gamers about it, however a method or one other, it is 2026, and we’re nonetheless apparently doing the factor the place Joel Bylos comes out with a brand new tackle MMORPGs to strive to exclude Dune Awakening however would not really do it and makes headlines throughout again. (I’m keen on Bylos, so simply think about I’m doing this complete put up with anate affection however drained mother tone.)
Yes, this weekBylos is again rewriting historical past and reframing the style again, suggesting that Funcom initially settled on the time period “MMO” for Dune Awakening “because [the devs] figured it was easy,” which is fascinating to us as a result of Bylos appeared to don’t have any qualms in any respect when describing the game as a sandbox MMORPG in 2024 and certainly explaining how Dune’s gameloop was heavily inspired by MMORPG Star Wars Galaxiesa player-economy-driven crafter-centric sandbox MMORPG that is nonetheless unbeaten in that area so far as I’m involved.
Of course, a 12 months in the past, identical to Dune was gearing up for launch, Bylos was hedging on those commentstrying to pivot the sport’s advertising again to the hardcore survival style to entice, we assume, the sorts of people that play Tarkovnot WoW. MMORPG players weren’t fooledand neither have been Tarkov gamers, because the game’s PvP split and subsequent revisions that favor the 80% of gamers who got here for PvE content material have already proven.
But even in any case of that, in accordance to an interview on FRVRBylos has swung even more durable in opposition to calling this MMO an MMO.
“I don’t think it’s an MMO,” he argues. “I’ve labored on a number of MMOs for positive, however I feel there was a bizarre area the place we have been trying to do barely extra. We have this massive, related world, we’ve got this massive deep desert with a number of gamers having the ability to go in there. So it was a tough recreation to describe, and I at all times discover that individuals sort of have a really set notion of what a style is. So it’s arduous to describe one thing that does one thing barely new. […] It’s not an MMO is my sturdy feeling proper now. […] it’s undoubtedly not.”
But then he goes on to declare that the important thing cause is development – that MMORPGs like world of warcraft deal with quest-based development, whereas Dune’s Progression revolves round crafting. If you are about to object and level out that sort of lots of MMORPG development has historically centered on crafting and non-quest-oriented content material, I know. I used to be there too. I do know. And it’s why this argument is not compelling, why it retains failing to persuade individuals who really dwell and breathe MMORPGs, as opposed to avid gamers from different genres who’ve been misled into pondering MMOs are simply video games precisely like WoW.
This is well-trod floor for MMORPG gamers, sadly, and I do not simply imply the fool’s errand of trying to define the MMORPG genre by attributes for which there is at all times an exception that disproves the rule. Last summer time, I deep-dived a bunch of MMORPGs and their studios – Dune Awakening, New World, The Cube, Lionhearts – that have been working overtime to redefine the MMORPG into a very small box that bizarrely excludes most historical MMORPGs. In reality, I explicitly confirmed how the rise of the survival style has “effectively robbed the MMORPG genre one of the fundamental terms we use to identify styles of MMOs” – that is, the long-running sandbox MMORPGs that deal with crafting, constructing, lifeskills, PvP, housing, and skilling and typically lack quests totally, all the best way again to Ultima Online. To quote that piece:
“These studios don’t dislike MMORPGs; they just don’t want the responsibility or cost of running a whole oneso they’re slowly redefining what MMOs are, either to get out of supporting them or to pick out subgenres to monetize separately, from MOBAs to battle royales and now to basic sandbox content, exploration, and the living world. Or maybe they’re just doing what Funcom did: waffle so hard on whether Dune Awakening is an MMO that it managed to convince not just gamers but itself that it didn’t have to listen to decades of MMO lessons. MMO gankbox endgames don’t work, but we’re not an MMO, so our gankbox endgame will work! […] Maybe all of this would be mere semantics except that those semantics shape history, and right now, we’re allowing semantics to both erase our genre and shrink its horizon too. To paraphrase myself: The reason ‘nobody is making MMORPGs/MMOs anymore’ is that gamers and studios have started believing and regurgitating that only 1:1 WoW Clones are MMORPGs and nothing else counts. “We are defining MMOs out of existence because we refuse to let them evolve – and refuse to acknowledge their bygone diversity.”
Unfortunately, this interview suggests to me that the miserable pattern we recognized continues – even with old-school MMORPG devs who know higher.
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