speaks

As of writing, Dune Awakening just got its final dev stream going over the mid and end game. These large chunks of the experience have been largely mysterious for the longest time, aside from brief mentions of the Deep Desert and the massive community effort required to interact with arguably the game’s most exciting feature: The Landsraad system.

The Landsraad system, a supercharged weekly selection of rotating tasks that’ll require a faction-wide push for certain objectives, aims to provide a set of goals for every kind of player that’ll be filling their face with Spice. But there’s so much more to dig into, which is why I sat down and talked to creative director Joel Bylos about what I feel may just be the best approach to community-focused gameplay in an MMO since Classic WoW’s Gates of Ahn’Qiraj.

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This interview kicks off with Joel discussing what PvP means in Dune Awakening, and how it covers far more than people stabbing each other on the sands.

Bylos: It’s not actually direct fighting, but it’s like the Atrades versus the Harkonnen […] Some of them are just PvE objectives, like craft this many ornithopters and deliver them to this place. Doing this while you as a guild are under the Atreides, let’s say. You complete several tasks and you see that there’s another Atreides guild higher than you, which also creates guild politics within just the Atreides faction, and you’re like, “we want to beat that other guild who keep coming first.” Right?

So, there’s also that as well as the conflict between the two factions, which is like, “The Harkonnen won the Landsraad this week. The traders need to get our s*** together and beat them for the next week.” Right? So, it’s both of those things in tandem.

VG247: When I was in Oslo, a comparison you made was to classic WoW in terms of your ideas in terms ofdesign. So, using that for my own comparison, it reminds me sort of like the Ahn’ Qiraj gate opening, where different guilds can either go and fight and kill bugs, or go and do PvP content, or they can make bandages and do herbalism and it all contributes to one big effort.

Bylos: Exactly. The Landsraad is an activity driver, right? It points people to activities at the end game. There’s something there for everyone. If you don’t like PvP, or rather when I say PvP I always think of PvP as any activity you do against another player even, if it If you don’t direct conflict as in shooting people in the face, that’s fine you can contribute by crafting things. There are some Landsraad tasks that are just to go run these PvE areas of the game and kill 30, 300 or 3,000 slavers this week in order for you to win our vote in the Landsraad.

PvE players can go do that. People who love running dungeons can go do that. It’s an activity driver that points to all of the activities at the end of the game, and that’s kind of the whole point of the Landsraad.

Biolabs in the Deep Desert are built with groups of four in mind! | Image credit: Funcom

VG247: Would you say it’s fair to say that in terms of what players will be doing on in the end game, once they’ve put in their 100 hours and they’ve got their big base, it’s the Landsraad system. I am a PVE lover. I love crafting stuff. Blah blah blah. It all plays into this one system.

Bylos: The Landsraad system, I’m dumbing it down a little bit with this example, but you have a daily quest system in a lot of MMO type games where they’re like “here’s some small activities for you.” This is us saying here are weekly activities that are meaningful and actually change the server right, and then it is like okay s let’s work together and compete against the other faction. Yeah.

VG247: That’s interesting because I looked at some of the Landsraad bonuses you get, and I saw one that was a ranged damage increase and that immediately set off red flags, like Jesus that sounds crazy. But I suppose if the Landsraad system is also pushing players to do crafting and PvE and gathering etc, that you can say okay s*** we lost last week. They’ve got a range damage PvP is a bad idea. let’s focus on gathering all this and try and circumvent it. So you got this sort of weekly dynamic shift, right?

Bylos: Exactly that. There are even there’s crafting bonuses and things like that, so winners can craft more. So combat is the preferred [alternative] there. The big one I think that sort of excites people and scares people is we have the full PvP loot in the Deep Desert. So you can turn on the salvage rights decree which means that anyone who dies in the deep desert can be full PvP looted…

That’s not the base level of the game, but that’s an example. In a way I kind of joke around because I think it’s funny on a very meta level that actually PvP players and PVE players are in conflict to try and get that decree pushed through. The Harkonnen players who want to PvP are like we really want to push to the ability to full loot, and all the PvE players who are also on the Harkonnen faction are like, hell no we don’t! So within that faction they’re even fighting over who gets the decree right and I think that’s kind of interesting right? That’s politics.

Just because you’re working for the same faction, doesn’t mean your goals are aligned. | Image credit: Funcom

VG247: It sounds like you have a deep love for community interaction. Not only in terms of the stereotypical sort of Alliance versus Horde dynamic, but in terms of how different players and the factions and subfactions interact with each other. Where does that love come from, and why is it so emphasized here?

Bylos: I’ve worked on MMOs most of my career, right? I started in 2008 or 2007 on Age of Conan,then Secret World. I worked on a Lego MMO for a bit. and then Conan Exiles, right? So, I’ve been doing these multiplayer games [for a while] and I think that the strength of these games is the multiplayer. You can just play a really well polished Ghost of Tsushima if you want a really good open world gaming experience. Why do people want to play these games with their friends? It’s because the social drama is what makes them interesting.

I just try to make mechanics that lean into it. Endgame I think is kind of the thing that I find nerve-wracking, it’s the part you don’t really know until everyone’s in there – how the endgame’s going to be. We’ve got guesses from how closed beta is going. We’ve seen how people are approaching it, but also there are different levels of how people approach things when a game launches versus how they are in a closed beta. And so it’s going to be really interesting.

We have all the microcosms. We have multiple worlds. And how are the Atreides and Harkonnen going to be on this server versus this server? I think that’s where I’m really interested in seeing how all this plays out.

How fights will play out around the Deep Desert, over spice and other resources, is something we’re keen to see. | Image credit: Funcom

VG247: In other games when super-dedicated players hit the end game they tend to hoard wealth, which I imagine could be a thorn to the Landsraad system. How will you combat that, so a leading faction or player guild don’t stay ahead?

Bylos:I mean people can hoard, so if you’re a smaller guild that can’t compete, we might save up for a time when we really need it. But there are 25 specific Landsraad tasks every week, and there’s a pool of 600 that can be drawn from. So you actually can’t really hoard with intent. If you say we’re going to hoard I don’t know silver las guns in case that delivery is required, it might not come up for eight months. So it’s not going to help your guild to hoard that much but you might hoard the precursor materials. You might hoard spice.

The other thing is the Landsraad is composed of 25 votes, and it gets revealed what each Landsraad envoy wants over time, but you can accelerate that process by sending in people to go find the envoys around the world and then bribe them with a chunk of spice. Once it’s revealed, it’s revealed for everybody in your faction. But if the Harkonnen reveal it, that doesn’t mean the Atreides get to see it. Eventually, we don’t have it in for launch, but eventually the plan is to have those envoys also give people quests that they can go do to reveal tasks.

Maybe you’re not a fighter, but a builder! There will be plenty for you to do. | Image credit: Funcom

VG247: I have one other major topic which is player expression. It seems like most of the progression is linear progression. As you get more gear, as you get better materials to build a better base etc… In terms of player expression, is that the extent of it? If I love PvP. I want to fly around my own and shoot down the Atreides players, is there any system that means another player can look at me in Harko village nad go “yeah, he’s a PVPer.”

Bylos: So the game has a huge customization system. A lot of the Landsraad rewards tie back to that customization system. So you can see the sort of a guy who has been doing tasks for house Dyvetz because he’s wearing the house Dyvetz colors right so that kind of stuff comes in. So you kind of can get access to different levels of social status by doing Landsraad tasks.

I think in terms of player expression, there are five kind of core archetypes that we chased in the game. We said, “Okay, how do these people have a role in our game?” And I think probably right now, yeah, I think three of them are very strong and two of them need a little more work to be stronger, that’s the stuff we’ll continue to work on in the post-launch.

Dune Awakening launches on June 10 for regular folks, but on June 5 for those who fancy spending a little bit more on the deluxe edition, on Steam!

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