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Dune: Awakening is going to look a whole lot different soon, with Funcom unveiling its plan – a plan I'd say many of us have been waiting to hear for months – to transform the survival MMO into a more PvE-focused game… one with a lot less PvP.
The studio announces as much in an update online – one that's come shortly after last month's arrival of 1.3.10, a huge post-Chapter 3 patch featuring a new overland location, Landsraad missions, bug fixes, and more.
"We've always envisioned Arrakis as a tense place where players must master the desert to survive the scorching sun, lack of water, ever-present Shai-Hulud, and other hazards," reads Funcom's post.
"We also want Dune: Awakening to feel like a triumph of your own making," it says. "Players should have the agency to tailor their experience and gravitate toward others with similar motivations, coexisting within the community."
And, that's where PvE comes in – because even though "Dune: Awakening offers a variety of playstyles," as Funcom puts it, the vast majority of us players don't really engage with PvP… at all.
This means the developer's old formula of balanced PvE and PvP isn't working. "However," as the team says, "with over 80% of our lifetime players exclusively engaging with PvE content, the convergence of PvE and PvP, particularly in the Deep Desert, didn't align with our objectives and remained a significant topic of discussion."
Looking at in-game data and fan feedback has changed the course of development for Funcom. It "made it clear that we needed to rethink our approach and underline the PvE-first nature of the game," which means that PvP "must be optional and incentivized rather than required for progression" – and I'm so here for it.
Funcom does point to Chapter 3 as having "alleviated" some of the problems with new features and reworked Landsraad Missions, which I'd agree that it certainly has, but the dev isn't quite finished yet.
Come patch 1.3.20.0, Funcom is disabling all PvP zones in the Hagga Basin across all official Worlds. All official Worlds will also have separate Deep Desert instances we can choose from: a PvE instance "for pure survival and exploration experience with no player combat" and a PvP instance "with the classic high-stakes environment and open-world conflict" that yields 2.5x the rewards from mining and spice harvesting.
Honestly, as a PvE-focused player myself, I'm absolutely thrilled, and one look at the Dune: Awakening subreddit shows I'm not alone. Folks are thanking Funcom left, right, and center, with PvP fans agreeing "this change was necessary" – so, yeah.
It's not the only exciting bit of news from the developer, either, adding a cherry on top of an already very tasty cake. You know the upcoming character migration and server merges? We're also getting self-hosted servers, which means we can finally host a private server for friends and create our own unique rules. Funcom says it'll be "available for testing soon" as a feature, with customization options similar to those of pretty much every other survival game that allows for custom or self-hosted servers.
The dev's rundown is worth a full read, in my opinion, if you're as interested as I am in setting up a private server.
It's all so much to take in, but I'm delighted. "Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him…" These changes are truly a gift from Shai-Hulud. Now we just need to, uh, be able to mount and ride sandworms – a girl can dream, right?
