Dune: Awakening’s survival game mechanics took inspiration from an unlikely source: EA’s PS1-era Harry Potter games from 20 years ago
Dune: Awakening is a survival MMO set in the world of Frank Herbert’s legendary sci-fi series. But that didn’t stop its developers taking inspiration from the world of a very different book.
In an interview with GamesRadar+ at Gamescom, CCO and creative director Joel Bylos explained how some of the game’s crafting systems came to life. “When we made Conan Exiles,” he explained, “there was something about chopping the trees, this rhythmic motion that is quite zen. You can get into this harvesting rhythm, and you feel good about that.” Unfortunately, Dune is famously pretty light on tree life, but Bylos was “very adamant that we find a way to try and bring that zen-like harvesting, because that’s something that people who like survival games and crafting games really enjoy doing.”
So Bylos and his team worked on the crafting and harvesting systems, coming up with a system that allows players to use cutters, drawing along weak points on scrap in order to break it apart and claim the useful materials contained within. You can see that system in action at the 8:40 mark in the gameplay presentation below, but if you were a fan of a slightly different piece of genre fiction 20 years ago, you might have already seen it in action already.
“If you ever played the original Harry Potter EA games,” Bylos says, “when you cast spells in those games, you have to trace out the spell line.” In order to learn a spell, you’d have to mimic the wand movement first, ‘drawing’ it on the screen with your controller. “That was kind of the inspiration. I always loved that mechanic in the Harry Potter games. I felt like no-one really does that.” Bylos explains that as your skills develop, the shapes you’ll have to cut will get a little more complex – I feel like that’s possibly in inverse correlation with the Philosopher’s Stone, where my 7 year-old hands could really not nail down the symbol for Flipendo, but it’s interesting to see Dune Awakening resurrect an idea that’s certainly fallen by the wayside in the past two decades.
Interestingly, Dune: Awakening isn’t the only game to borrow from those old Harry Potter games – out very soon, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions has a snitch-catching mechanic that’s also extremely similar to the gameplay from those original games. Who says wizard-tech had to come on in the past 20 years?