Last December, at The Game Awards, Funcom, the makers of Conan Exiles released a teaser trailer for their upcoming title Dune: Awakening. The visuals were so stunning, you could almost feel the grit of the sand in your teeth and feel the wind off the wings of the Ornithopters and since that time… there has been silence.

Till now. Funcom has released the first Dev Log, and Richard Cawte, the Tech Director at Funcom, shares with us some of the first glimpses of what they are building and how to bring Arrakis alive.

Their principle is staying true to Dune from an art perspective, and their main sources of inspiration are the books written by Frank Herbert, and the most recent Dune movie by Villeneuve, as well as real-life locations on Earth and Mars.

Building an authentic Arrakis, the planet on which the game will take place, is as monumental as the planet itself. And you will be able to explore some of the diversity of Arrakis through landmarks, points of interest, and even player-built structures.

Dune is a vast, huge brutal world. In the movies, we only saw a small part of the planet and almost no vegetation at all. We saw huge, open brutalist architecture, endless desert, and gigantic sandworms able to swallow even the largest man-made machines. We are but specks, yet we survive.

The map is hand-designed, yet their procedural generation bot, Houdini, will change the map by adding erosion, cliffs, and debris. They want you to feel like you are traversing and exploring a living world and not just a map; the more you explore, the more mysteries you will uncover.

Landmarks dot the horizon, as do shipwrecks and ecology labs, daring you to explore them and create exciting and memorable moments.

A major portion of Arrakis’s population lives in the Graben, a colossal sunken landmass that shelters its inhabitants from the violent winds and storms of Arrakis.

The only safe havens for players to build on are scattered rock croppings, lest they be swallowed up by the huge sandworms. You will come across hundreds of players as they explore the world and claim their own part of Arrakis, building their bases however they want in a huge array of architectural styles in their highly customizable building system.

You will influence Arrakis, but remember, Arrakis reshapes everything and everyone, and spice is life.

What are you most excited about the planet of Arrakis? Let me know in the comments below.