Funcom is largely known as an MMO company, but its modern games have always struggled against strict genre labels. Dune Awakening, for example, is massively multiplayer, online, and an RPG, but it’s also a survival game. So, is it really an MMO? Game director Joel Bylos thinks not.

Alongside discussing the game’s long-term 10-year plan and the game’s player count, Dune Awakening game director Joel Bylos explained that expressing the genre of Funcom’s latest survival game has been a challenge.

“I mean, I think that’s one of the biggest challenges we had during development. How to describe it. Because we had this online server setup,” Bylos told us. “It’s quite complicated compared to most survival games and we wanted to have multiple maps… so we weren’t really sure, and then, at some point, we were describing it as an MMO because we figured it was easy”.

While early reveals and discussions clearly labelled Dune Awakening as an MMO, the developers removed the MMO label prior to release. “We launched in June, I think, we dropped it November before,” Bylos said. The reason for dropping the MMO label was due to the overall confusion around the game’s genre. They added, “I don’t think that helped either” as removing the label introduced additional confusion.

Bylos, and many working on Dune Awakening, have a background in MMO development. Bylos was one of the lead designers on Funcom’s prior MMO Age of Conan and a lead content designer on The Secret World. There are inherent MMO quirks that exist within both Conan Exiles and Dune Awakening, and they’re part of why the games are unique and have satisfying loops. However, Bylos doesn’t think either game is an MMO, at least not anymore.

“I don’t think it’s an MMO,” he continued. “I’ve worked on multiple MMOs for sure, but I think there was a weird space where we were trying to do slightly more. We have this big, connected world, we have this big deep desert with lots of players being able to go in there. So it was a hard game to describe, and I always find that people kind of have a very set notion of what a genre is. So it’s hard to describe something that does something slightly new.”

“It’s not an MMO is my strong feeling right now,” Bylos continued, “it’s definitely not.” The game director explains that the clearest example of where the genre splits is how it focuses on progression. While both World of Warcraft and Dune Awakening have level-based progression, WoW focuses on Quests whereas D:A focuses on crafting to pull you through the game.

Nevertheless, Bylos admits that finding a way properly describe Dune: Awakening has been a “tough challenge”, and the studio still struggles with it. To this day, many gamers still see Dune: Awakening as an MMORPG when it’s really not. Yes, there are MMO elements still, but as far as the game’s director is concerned, it’s not an MMO. 

As Funcom continues working on the game’s upcoming console port, there are a number of secretive improvements coming to the game alongside new content. Additionally, the survival game recently split PvE and PvP players into segregated groups, which Bylos explains will allow the team to improve both aspects of the game easier with more focused data from players.