Dune: Awakening, the open-world survival game set in Frank Herbert’s legendary sci-fi universe, is finally making it so player-versus-player encounters are entirely optional.
When Dune: Awakening first launched last summer, more than a few players felt blindsided by its PvP-focused endgame that required journeying into the Deep Desert map filled with roaming bands of hostile players in order to secure Spice and resources needed to make endgame gear and vehicles. The disconnect between PvP and PvE was made even more confusing due to the fact that the first 60 or so hours of the survival game is almost entirely PvE focused, making the sudden shift to PvP jarring for those who simply wanted to keep progressing as they had been.
While developer Funcom had implemented half measures post-launch (such as making it so a larger portion of the Deep Desert was PvE only), PvE will be the main focus of Dune: Awakening going forward. As detailed in a blog post, Funcom found that 80% of the game’s lifetime players engaged exclusively with PvE, making it clear that Funcom needed to “rethink” its approach.
That new approach is that Dune: Awakening will become “PvE first” by removing PvP zones from the game’s main Hagga Basin map and making it so its endgame Deep Desert zone will soon have separate PvE and PvP versions.
“By separating these experiences, we allow players to hunt for spice or explore Imperial Testing Stations without the constant threat of a blade in the dark, while ensuring those who live for the thrill of the hunt have a dedicated arena to prove their mettle and the rewards to make it worthwhile.”
There will still be some benefits to be earned through PvP, for those who want to engage in it. Deep Desert resource yields will be multiplied 2.5 times in PvP zones to make the risk match the reward. Funcom didn’t state exactly when these changes will be going live, but the shift to a PvE focus will be coming with patch 1.3.20.0 and will soon be playable on the game’s public test client.
Funcom additionally announced self-hosted servers are on the way, allowing players to host servers for friends or communities. Hosts will be able to tweak various settings like harvesting rates, item and base durability, and more, with additional customization settings slated to be added over time. Players will have the ability to transfer their existing characters over to private servers, though there won’t be an option for transferring them back to official servers. Funcom also won’t charge for the ability to self-host servers, though the developer warns players could incur additional costs from their internet service provider.
Dune: Awakening is currently only available on PC, though a console version is slated to arrive sometime this year. The game’s most recent Chapter 3 update arrived in February and continued Dune: Awakening’s main story, as well as introduced new endgame PvE options and additional layers of character progression in the form of Specalizations and Augementations.