Dune Awakening creative director Joel Bylos revealed during a press Q&A earlier this month that "a bunch of constraints" were put in place for the team as part of its collaboration with Hollywood. This, it turns out, was one of the core reasons why the game takes place in an alternate history.

Being a multiplayer survival game set on a vast desert planet, Dune Awakening has to work hard to avoid being repetitive. There’s only so much sand you can run across before it

A hybrid of survival games and MMOs, Dune Awakening has earned thousands of players on Steam already, despite the launch date being unknown.

Awakening's gameplay is as demanding as the sands of Arrakis. It has a clear audience, targeting hardcore survival players and lifelong Dune fans who appreciate its more hard sci-fi approach, and the game's various features and mechanics would fit right into a Dune novel.