While the survival MMO Dune: Dune:Awakening was a gleam in Funcom's eye, the Norwegian studio was working on another multiplayer open-world survival game: Conan Exiles. This bare-bones survival sandbox had a lot going for it, including a base-building system, bloody combat, and a grueling survival experience, but there was one feature in particular that caught everyone's attention.

Conan Exiles has a ...... Yes, the game describes it as "nourishment," but we informally refer to it as "dong slider." Character creation allowed us to change the size of a character's penis (if he had one) from demi to venti and everything in between. In addition, the character's vagina was fully physics-enabled; when he jumped naked, his vagina would jiggle and bounce around. It was truly a sight to behold. Our article on the inner thigh slider in [Conan Exile] became the biggest news story of 2017, and my tweet demonstrating the slider in a video clip is still getting "likes" months later! and retweets.

So, Dune: when I attended the gameplay presentation of "Dune: Awakening" at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week and got my first look at this MMO's extensive character creation system ...... I couldn't help but ask: "What's the point of this? After all. It took me a while to work up the courage, but I finally posed the question to Dune: Executive Producer of Awakening, Scott Jr. [Conan Exiles] famously had a genital slider when he created the character. 'Dune didn't have them. Why not?

"Oh," said Junior. 'And Junior said. 'It's not as sexy as Conan Equilibrium. So I want to focus on Dune rather than what I was doing with Conan Exiles."

"Have you considered it?" I asked, aware of the fact that it would not be enough to justify writing this story later. Did you talk to the Herbert Estate and say, "Can we put in adjustable genitalia?"

"I don't think so," Junior said.

Plausible. As a comforting note, let me report on the character creation system in Dune: the character creation system in Awakening appears to be otherwise quite substantial. There are sliders for everything from arm and leg thickness to neck length and freckle density. Iris and pupil size, eye height, width, and angle, and even "squint" degree, "scleral tint," and eyeliner and eye shadow makeup options.

But there are no acorn sliders in this universe.