Why Dune: Awakening Is Chasing Star Wars Galaxies' Beautiful, Doomed Dream

I have a confession: I never became a Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies. Not because I didn't try, but because the game seemed to actively hate me. And honestly? That was the whole point. The original pitch for SWG was a masterclass in bold, almost suicidal design: in a galaxy of trillions, only a tiny fraction would ever be Force-sensitive. Becoming a Jedi was a mysterious, opaque grind that most players would never complete. It was a conceit so audacious that I still can't decide whether it was genius or madness. Probably both.

Of course, we all know how that story ended. The developers eventually caved, and in what one of them called "the most infamous patch in videogame history," Jedi became just another class you could pick at character creation. The game was never the same. The magic evaporated, and SWG limped along until it was finally put out of its misery. But before that, it was a true sandbox MMO—a place where you could be a dancer, a chef, a creature handler, or a moisture farmer if you damn well pleased. It was impossibly ambitious, doomed to frustrate a lot of players, and yet the ones who loved it really loved it. I was one of them, even if I never got to wield a lightsaber.

So when I sat down to talk with Joel Bylos, creative director of the upcoming survival MMO Dune: Awakening, and he mentioned Star Wars Galaxies as a huge inspiration, I felt a shiver of both excitement and dread. Excitement because, yes, please, give me another sandbox that trusts players to make their own stories. Dread because, well, we all saw how that turned out for SWG. But Bylos isn't naive. He knows the history. "That's the style of MMO we really like, the old sandboxy MMOs," he told me. "Then World of Warcraft came out and everyone copied that for a few years, or still do. But a lot of us are old school MMO players." Funcom, after all, has been around since the Anarchy Online days, so they've got the scars to prove it.

Bylos has some serious MMO bona fides. He was the lead content designer on The Secret World, a flawed but creatively ambitious game that tried something genuinely different from WoW. In his view, MMOs peaked in popularity around 2010, and after that, most developers abandoned the genre for hotter properties like MOBAs. These days, survival games are the ones eating Steam's lunch, and Bylos sees them as the natural descendants of the sandbox MMOs he loved. "The crafting part of MMOs became survival games, with smaller private servers," he explained. "MOBAs were like the MMO PvP minigames back in the day. The survival elements are a different kind of funnel into the game… I don't think they're miles apart. We like that concept, that this is where survival games are, they are that sandbox break-off from MMOs, and we can bring that back."

That's the dream, anyway. But here's the elephant in the desert: Dune: Awakening isn't trying to replicate SWG's opaque Jedi system. You won't be becoming a Bene Gesserit sister, though you can learn some of their powers from rogue trainers. More broadly, Funcom wants Awakening to be an MMO where you can make your own way—crafting, building, selling blueprints to other players—rather than following a rigid questline. It's "not full Star Wars Galaxies," as Bylos put it. There are no classes, and the survival aspects take precedence. But he argues that nailing the fundamentals makes all the difference. "If the game director was here, he'd be saying 'if the game feels really good to play moment-to-moment, the way you move in the world, the way you shoot in the world, driving, if those things feel great and then you have this amazing universe around it, it's going to be fine.'"

So why would Awakening succeed where SWG ultimately failed? For one, it's not trying to be a full-blown Star Wars Galaxies clone. It's a survival game first, with MMO trappings. And survival games have already proven they can sustain large, passionate communities. Plus, Bylos and his team are under no illusion that they're making a game for everyone. They're making a game for the people who want to get lost in a desert and build a moisture farm, or a spice refinery, or whatever else their heart desires. And if the moment-to-moment gameplay—the shooting, the driving, the movement—feels great, then the sandbox will have a solid foundation.

I, for one, am cautiously optimistic. I've been burned before (RIP my dreams of being a Jedi), but I'm also a sucker for a beautiful, doomed dream. And if Dune: Awakening can capture even a fraction of the magic that made SWG so special—without the infamous patch—then maybe, just maybe, we'll get the sandbox MMO we deserve. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go practice my Bene Gesserit voice. 😅