Back in December of last year, a press release from Funcom announced that the developing multiplayer survival sandbox based on the DUNE IP was getting some co-development help from a studio called NUKKLEAR. A new press release just out today confirms that Funcom is enlisting the help of another co-developer: Abstraction, which has partnered with Bioware/EA, 343/Microsoft, Mythical Games, Snail Games, and Perfect World, among others.
According to the Abstraction website, members of the company “are working together with Funcom” and are “integrated into Funcom and split over the engine, gameplay and other core system teams.” Readers will recall that NUKKLEAR was brought on to help with vehicular-based gameplay, so this new development head count will apparently flesh out other systems. The website once more confirms this new DUNE game will fall in the open-world survival sub-genre. (Edit: Initially, the Abstraction website also posted a release window of 2022, but it has since been removed, and Funcom reached out to us and let us know that the window hasn’t been announced and isn’t 2022, which honestly makes sense as we didn’t believe 2022 either!)
As a refresher, news about this DUNE survivalbox has been pretty glacial. Funcom first made noise about this new game after landing the IP rights in 2019, calling it “a more robust and ambitions version” of Conan Exiles in April 2020. News about the game then didn’t come until December of that year, when Tencent’s buyout of Funcom was noted as something that allowed the studio to expand the game’s scope. Then, of course, there’s the earlier referenced December 2021 presser and now this new one out today.
