The MMO market has grown stagnant over the past decade with once-great titles such as World Of Warcraft falling far away from its glory days in the early 2000’s, though there are titles and developers who manage to still attract the attention of gamers. Riot is one developer currently working on their own MMO set in the League Of Legends universe, and Final Fantasy 14–2 manages to keep a fresh cycle of players regularly logging in, so it’s unfair to claim that MMO Games are dead. But in the case of Dune: Awakening, it may indeed be dead on arrival.
In a recent interview with Eurogamer, the creative director for Dune: Awakening, Joel Bylos, said that they’ll be telling their own version of events from Dune and specifically said that they’d be side-stepping religion.
Dune: Awakening is a Survival MMO, an already niche sub-genre of gaming, so to potentially alienate Dune fans with this massive change may signal difficulties ahead for this title.
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“Things are slightly different in our universe. Many events are still the same, so it’s not like we’ve gone all ‘thousands of years ago, a rock slid in the wrong place and changed everything’. It’s just a few years back. But the significant thing—it’s really close to spoiler territory, which I can’t really go through—but let’s just say that for the large part, we sort of sidestep religion.”
The novel of Dune has heavy influences taken from the actual real-world religion of Islam, and there are many references to the Middle East and Northern Africa in the book, with the languages used seemingly being modeled off of Arabic. In these regions of the world, religion is a fundamental part of their culture and way of life.
It is not as if the novels were simply reveling in the idea that religion was always a good thing that should never be questioned. The Dune series delved deep into Islamic themes while also shining a light on the dangers of theocracy and how charismatic individuals can manipulate the faithful to their own ends. Removing such a foundational piece of the Dune world-building seems almost unjustifiable.
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“I found a point in the universe—like it was a really fun thing to go back to the Herberts and be like, “Hey, if we say this happened in our universe, and then this is the flow of consequences from that, so at this point, things changed, are you okay with that?” Because then I can kind of position everything for a video game, and they were like, “Yeah, actually that’s great”, and then you’re not stepping on the lore.”
Bylos continued the interview by stating that he did get permission to make these changes in Dune: Awakening from the Herbert Estate—the author, Frank Herbert, passed away back in 1986. And while the approval from the estate is all fine and good, it’s impossible to say what Frank Herbert would have thought about such a change. Especially when he seemed so inspired by the cultures of the Middle East, and their faiths.
While it’s impossible to say what this change fully consists of, the quote by Bylos does leave room for the interpretation that overall events in Dune may not be changed. However, as with any adaptation in the modern era, it has all the red flags popping up at once. For instance, if the changes to the Dune lore don’t actually change the events that take place in Dune, why is the change being made at all?
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The interview never really dives into explaining why the change has been made or what it does to improve upon the game’s story. Bylos claims that such a reveal would lead to “major spoilers,” but it’s just as likely that Bylos and the team creating the game simply did not want to be involved in a game with such heavy religious tones. With no explanation, people can only speculate—and given the arbitrary changes made to most adaptations with the sole purpose of appeasing a non-existent “modern audience,” it feels as though this may be the real reason.
“I think we’re gonna get probably, you know, early criticism from people who haven’t finished the story – because they’re gonna be like, “Oh, it’s another chosen one story,” and then I think they’re gonna find out that they’re wrong.”
While the rest of the interview primarily focused on Bylos speaking on the compulsion of gamers and his thoughts on the survival genre as a whole, this last quote seemed to acknowledge there would be backlash from fans of Dune who play the game. However, he seems to believe that after the initial backlash, people will come to realize how great the story really is.
What makes this decision so confusing is that most fans of Dune are true-blue lore fanatics, possibly even more so than Tolkien fans are, and we remember how ruthlessly those fans tore into the recent adaptation of Rings Of Power on Amazon Prime.
Fans of the series will simply have to wait and see to find out if that is true or not. Most dedicated fans of any series are reticent to accept any changes being made to the source material, as was seen in the recent Netflix adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The removal of religious aspects from Dune: Awakening seem massive compared to the changes made with Avatar.
What are your thoughts on the removal of religion in Dune: Awakening?
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