Dune Awakening Gamescom 2025 Q&A – ‘We Just Need to Keep Working and Solve the Problems, We Have One of the Best Survival Games’

At Gamescom 2025, we had the opportunity to meet up once again with Funcom about Dune Awakening. The survival sandbox MMO set in Arrakis launched around three and a half months ago on PC, and as an online game, it is really just getting started.

Last month, we learned that the game had already attracted over a million players. However, the community also identified some issues that the development team is looking to correct and improve upon, starting with Chapter 2, an update due to go live on September 10.

In our conversation with Dune Awakening Game Director Joel Bylos, we discussed that and much more, including consoles, private servers, and Chapter 3.

Maybe we can start by talking about the game's launch and its aftermath.

Dune Awakening launched in early access on the 5th of June, and went very, very well. People were very excited about the game. I think we got to 89% positive on Steam, and then when the game launched for real, we had a lot of people coming in. I think we had some issues here and there with stability, things like that. Nothing major, I think, for a while and then what we've seen is that people play the game a lot, it's a very sticky game, so lots and lots of people play the game for many, many hours. As people reach the end game, there's more issues that they're encountering and having some issues there, s it's been a very positive launch, but yeah, we have work to do on the endgame.

Tell us about the freshly announced Chapter 2 update.

On September 10th, we're launching what we call Chapter 2, which includes a free update and a paid DLC. The free update includes the main story being updated, a bunch of new dynamic encounters in the world, the character recustomizer, and there's a content like contracts and things that you do around these things, and then the paid DLC comes with a new vehicle, which is called the treadwheel. It comes with a new sort of storyline that's just a single storyline that you play through with a couple of dungeons and quests to do. All of the rewards for this are cosmetic.

Are there also going to be any fixes in this free patch based on the community feedback?

Yeah, the updates come every 3 months or so. Every month, we're also patching as well, so there's a big patch that we just released last week, called 1.20. It has a lot of fixes in it. There'll be another big patch when this launches, which comes with a bunch of fixes and quality of life improvements, reacting to feedback on things like the Deep Desert and the endgame. People have been complaining about the weight of cobalt paste, so we've been fixing that in the game. We just listen to players and try to improve what they want us to fix.

I know that shortly after launch, the community requested more PvE space in the Deep Desert. How did that go? Will there be any more changes to that?

That is a complicated one. We increased the Deep Desert PvE space, but the Deep Desert was never designed for PvE. So when we did that, it led to a bunch of other problems cascading from that, which we needed to fix. We had players using this to grief, we had PvP people finding ways to lock down people's resources in the PvE area, so we fixed a lot of those things, and we're continuing to do so. The long-term plan for Chapter 3 and coming in the future is to build out a PvE endgame that doesn't rely on the Deep Desert and have the Deep Desert continue to be a PvP space, so to try and build separate paths for people in PvE and PvP, so that people have different places to go depending what they like to play.

This PvE endgame, will it be with group dungeons or something like that?

Yeah, we have a lot of ideas around both solo and group activities that will be driven by the Landsraad, our political system. People will be able to log in and they'll be able to fly around the map and find things like assassinations, yes, we'll definitely have group dungeons. There'll be more things like attacking convoys, defending harvesters and things like that, so we're trying to come up with a whole range of activities and players can choose which ones they want to do.

You mentioned Chapter 3. Is there a timeline for when it could launch?

Yeah, it's early next year. I think it's like every three months. So we'll see where we end up. It depends on the timing: late this year or early next year. Every three months is the rough cadence of when we do these major updates, the chapters.

What is the status of the console versions of Dune Awakening?

We're working towards a launch on console sometime next year. We've just begun after launch, and started really digging into it. I've seen it running on a PlayStation 5, but there were a lot of texture issues, still a lot of work to do, and then we have to do all the different requirements for the different consoles and optimize the game shaders to work properly with the different console hardware, so there's work to do. We usually assume that it's going to take us about a year to get it up and running properly on a console. So yeah, sometime next year, now, probably we will have one launch at the same time as GTA VI *laughs*.

Do you plan to have one big community with cross-play, or will the PC and console servers stay separate?

It's still on the conversations we're having with Microsoft and PlayStation to decide that, so we haven't actually made a decision, but from our technical standpoint, it's no problem for us because we run these servers and the games will connect to our service. So it's not a problem, but it depends on what the platform holders have to say; we need to have those conversations. We haven't had them yet.

I know that you have introduced private servers. How are they going? Are they popular, or do most players play on the official servers?

It's popular. I think the server providers that we work with are happy. I have met a few of them
here at Gamescom and they seem to be happy. We see a lot of private servers, especially for people who really don't want to deal with other players, and then on official servers, we still have a pretty healthy population.

Do you plan to allow even console players to use private servers eventually?

We did it with Conan Exiles and it was a fair bit of work to get it working, but we managed it, so I think we can probably do it for Dune Awakening as well.

Are there going to be any changes to how private servers work in general?

As we build out the game and continue to work on it, we'll probably add more options for the private servers. We may one day allow people to run their own servers. Yes, there will be changes coming to the private servers.

What can you share about the third faction?

We want to add a third faction for general balance and the Landsraad. The idea was to actually add it this year, but because we're working on fixing the endgame activities, we might end up pushing the third faction a little bit, so they might come early next year instead.

Maybe around the time of the third Chapter?

That could be. I can't say who they are, though.

Do you have any plans for allowing character transfers?

Yes, we will allow character transfers in the future. But it's a tech we need to build. So we haven't got it yet, but we have been working on it. It's in the pipeline on our list of things, but it's not finished yet, so I can't say when.

Do you know if it will be something that Dune Awakening players have to purchase if they want to transfer a character?

We haven't talked about it yet, so I don't know. We'll do the tech test, and then we can see. If we charge for it, if there is a price to do a character transfer, it's usually because we need someone from customer service to actually do the work of making it happen. So it costs us time. If it's something we can automate, then it will be free. But it depends; I don't know yet.

Is there going to be more faction-specific gear in the future?

Yes, definitely, we're going to keep adding to the factions.

Will there be new battlefields or arenas?

I think it's safe to say that. Yes, we'll be adding new stuff for people to fight over in the future.

What about a paid skin store?

Not in the plans right now, we've been trying to avoid having microtransactions in the game. Never say it won't ever come, but we're trying to make it so that all of those kinds of cosmetics, you get them through playing the DLC, so if you buy the DLC, you get a bunch of those cosmetics.

But are you going to add more ways to customize your character?

Yes, new hairstyles, tattoos, and things like that are coming soon to Dune Awakening with Chapter 2.

Will there be any daily or weekly quests?

Yeah, that's the Landsraad system that's supposed to give people daily and weekly contracts. Those contracts count towards the Landsraad and also give personal progression. This is part of the endgame plan we're working on for Chapter 3.

Are you planning to extend the voice track distance?

We haven't talked about it, so not right now. I can have a chat with people on the team. I haven't really seen a lot of feedback on that, so that's an interesting question.

In terms of balance, are you going to make some changes to Tier 6 NPCs? Some are saying they are frustrating to fight as a ranged character.

I mean, they need to then start using melee. The game is designed around the idea that you switch between melee and ranged, not that you stay as one all the time, so the player is making a choice to be suboptimal in this scenario. Other people give feedback that the NPCS are too easy and so it's a balance on how the players approach it. So, we are probably not going to make Tier 6 much easier. I would recommend that the players who find it difficult to fight with just ranged weapons consider switching a little bit.

In general, how do you feel about the community that's being created with Dune Awakening? There is some negativity as well - how do you deal with it?

I cry myself to sleep every night, and I drink a lot; it's the best way to handle this stuff. No, I mean, communities are communities, right? There's really good people who really love the game and enjoy it. Some people play for 1000 hours in 2 months and don't like the game. But I feel like anyone who feels this much and this strongly about the game, even if they're angry, they locked something right, because it's like a relationship that breaks up and they get very mad at the end, I felt like they enjoyed the game. What I try to do is figure out what causes those breakups with the game and then try to solve those problems.

I think how I feel and how the team feels is that we just need to keep working, just put our heads down and keep working and solve the problems that the people have, because I do believe that we have created one of the best survival games. It's very clear to me that the first hundred or two hundred hours, which is a ridiculous statement to make because most games aren't even a 100 hours long, is absolutely fantastic, top-tier stuff. Only when people go past that, they start to get quite negative because the endgame is a bit repetitive. Yes, we need some time to work on that, but on my end, if we just keep going, we keep working, listen to what people say, and make it better.

One last thing. Denis Villeneuve is officially working on the third film. Is it going to affect Dune Awakening in any way? Maybe some cosmetics, or even a DLC?

Definitely. I don't have all the details yet, but as soon as I get more details from Legendary about what's going to happen with the film and when it's going to release and things like that, then we're going something to make sure that the game and the movie have some tie-in together and make sure that things are tied together. This is why we're making Dune Awakening with Legendary, because we want to promote each other. So for sure, there'll definitely be something.

Thank you for your time.

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