Dune: Awakening may eventually take players beyond Arrakis to other planets

A couple of decades ago there was a period when all videogames and especially all Unreal Engine videogames had to be brown and grey and dingy. "The Gears of Warrification of graphics," we used to call it, huddled up in the chest-high trenches with our Xbox 360 controllers. Survival MMO Dune: Awakening threatens to bring that back in a big way: the novel and films on which it’s based take place, after all, on an entire planet made of sand.

Developers Funcom have various plans for sprucing up the aesthetic, however. For one thing, parts of Awakening are set underground, where there’s actual, canonical vegetation and thus, a wider range of colours. For another, it’s possible Dune: Awakening will ultimately leave the dunes behind and whisk us away on a journey to another planet.