Join Joel Bylos, chief creative officer of Funcom, and Greig Fraser, academy award winning Cinematographer on Villeneuve’s Dune Part 1 and 2, for a deep dive look at Dune: Awakening, an upcoming open-world survival MMO coming to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. Watch as we see new footage of Arrakis from Dune: Awakening as the team discusses creating the game's world, the collaboration between Dune: Awakening and the recent Dune movies, and bringing Dune's fantasy world to life.
Category
🎮️
GamingTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 Arrakis is this unrelenting anvil
00:05 against which people are beaten and 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?
00:59 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
02:13 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.
03:11 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.
05:18 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.
05:36 Humans have always had this innate drive
05:43 to create something, to build worlds,
05:46 whether it's in their head, whether it's in text,
05:49 whether it's on screens, whether it's in games.
05:52 Funcom as a company has been on this journey for a long time,
05:55 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.
06:03 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 who really want to live
06:26 in the universe that Frank Herbert created,
06:28 and they really want to live in the visual world of the films
06:31 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.
06:43 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 for everybody.
06:50 (dramatic music)
06:52 (dramatic music)
06:55 (dramatic music)
06:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]