It’s hard to think of a science fiction universe as inseparable from its canon as Dune. And yet at the same time, it’s a universe where so much can vary from one interpretation to the next (as you’ll be swiftly reminded any time you catch a stray set photo of a greased-up Sting.)
With that in mind it probably makes a lot of sense for Dune: Awakening, the survival MMO from Conan: Exiles developer Funcom, to take its “alternate history” approach. Dune: Awakening takes place “a few years” before the events of the books, but those events are entirely different timelines, with Awakening imagining a scenario where a “significant moment” in the books, where someone makes a decision of some kind, is decided differently.
Joel Bylos, Funcom’s chief creative officer and creative director on Dune: Awakening, was coy about what decision that was, let alone what the consequences of it might be. “It’s not Paul that makes the decision,” he would at least say, referring to protagonist Paul Atreides. This was after I’d asked whether it might be his drinking of the Water of Life that decision was referring to – the moment where Atreides effectively chooses the path of war in Frank Herbert’s novels, and now Denis Viellneuve’s films.
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