Of all the big MMOs coming out in the near future, Dune Awakening looks to be one of the most graphically intensive games, and with its focus on server grids and vast deserts hosting large-scale PvP battles, it’s going to be quite eye-catching.
That’s great news for those of us with powerful rigs, but it also means a lot of time is spent making sure the game runs on different levels of hardware. Moving onto the Xbox Series S – the game will still launch alongside the PlayStation 5 and PC – Chief Product Officer Scott Junior said that was a “challenge”.
Manage Cookie Settings
“So, that’s one of the reasons why we released it on PC first. We need to do a lot of optimization before releasing it on Xbox. However, Xbox Series S is really a challenge,” Junior said in an interview at Gamescom 2024 at the end of last month. Junior also revealed some highlights of the ongoing closed beta test and said that a lot of time has been spent to ensure that the game can run on a variety of machines with different hardware specifications.
“Unreal Engine does a lot of the work for us in some ways. What we do more is optimize the assets and use various techniques, whether it’s FSR or other techniques, to reproduce the frames. We want the game to look amazing on the high end, whether you’re on a 3070 or a 4090, but we also want it to look good… I don’t think we’ve released our minimum specs yet, but you know a powerful graphics card from a few years ago should be able to run the game. It should look good – it won’t be able to take advantage of the ultra-spec options, but it should still look good.”
However, given the sheer scale of the game, we asked Junior if, even with all the work done on optimization, the game still requires a low-spec machine. His response was optimistic. “Yes, it does. But it still performs well on hardware from many years ago. We can definitely do it!”
If you want to try out Dune Awakening for yourself and test the game, Junior says the number of new players will increase significantly in the coming months. So far, testing seems to have been targeted at a “core player base,” but future tests are designed to push the game’s server player limits to their limits.
“Our next beta is designed to fully max out a world and then test it from start to finish with the maximum number of concurrent users we have at any one time.” When asked if a true open beta would be made available to players in the coming months, Junior was tight-lipped, but said that invite-only numbers would increase significantly in the months leading up to Dune Awakening’s release in early 2025.
Are you excited for Dune Awakening? Let us know below, as well as which platform you plan to play the game on.