Dune: Awakening will take players to the deadly, sandworm infested desert planet of Arrakis, but developer Funcom doesn't want the upcoming survival MMO's various systems to scare away those who might not typically dabble in the survival game genre.

New details about the MMO set in Frank Herbert's sci-fi universe come via a PC Gamer interview with Dune: Awakening's creative director, who shares that Funcom is looking at some of the assumptions of the genre and rethinking what survival game systems can look like.

"There are assumptions that have just been there since the start of the survival genre, because the first [survival game] did them," Joel Bylos, Dune: Awakening's creative director said. "And everybody else sort of copied that, so we're rethinking some of those paradigms. And so I would say that we want to create these very strong survival tensions, but we also don't want to punish players in a ridiculously harsh way. So we're kind of trying to find a nice balance with that."