Here's Why Dune: Awakening Won't Constantly Kill You With Nuclear Explosions

Survival MMO Dune: Awakening means to put you on the sands of Arrakis, fighting to keep your water in your body--fending off both the harsh arid climate and the weapons of other players in some of its PvP gameplay. Developer Funcom is including a whole bunch of different weapons and technologies for you to use in combat, including shields and the knives and swords that can penetrate them, vehicles like ornithopters, and projectile weapons.

Dune: Awakening will also include "lasguns," powerful laser-like weapons that are depicted in the recent Dune movies to be devastatingly powerful. Good news, though: As creative director Joel Bylos confirmed at a Dune: Awakening hands-off preview event last week, using lasguns in the game won't get you annihilated by a nuclear blast.

If you're not familiar with Dune lore, that might sound like a weird thing to be worried about. It's something the characters of Frank Herbert's novels are very worried about, however. In the story, the interaction between the laser-like rays and forcefield-like defensive shields--which are used on everything from ships and buildings to individual people--creates a massive nuclear explosion. Use a lasgun to shoot somebody wearing a shield and you'll take out yourself and everyone in the vicinity.

"In our story, there's an incident with a lasgun and a shield that occurred, and from that point on all CHOAM-imported lasguns to the planet now have a safety built in so they cannot target a shield," Bylos explained. "So if you aim a lasgun at a shield in our game, it just turns the lasgun off automatically and that's basically something we had to do for gameplay because we can't have nuclear explosions. I mean, we could have nuclear explosions going off all the time, it just wouldn't be very fun for everybody except the person who caused him. We discussed this with our partners at [Dune production company] Legendary and we talked to the Herberts as well, and kind of got their sign-off on this so we could do it this way."

Bylos said Funcom tried the idea of having lasguns and shields blow everyone up, but ultimately had to scrap the idea because it didn't make for very fun gameplay.

"We had this prototype that we made, which was kind of like Ghostbusters, you know, when they cross the streams and everything gets unstable. The lasgun starts to shake and then the two players just exploded in nuclear explosions, but it just felt a little tacky as well, unfortunately, but was fun. So anyway, no, you can't do the lasgun-shield thing, sadly, but it's still there in the lore and it's explained why you can't in our game."

Dune: Awakening is slated to release on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5, but currently has no set release date. You can sign up for the Dune: Awakening closed beta on its website.