Dune: Awakening Chapter 3 is "not going to please everyone," but it's only the start of many changes for the survival MMO – including melee tweaks, an endgame PvE overhaul, and private servers

Funcom is ready to breathe some fresh life into Dune: Awakening with Chapter 3, it seems – a good few hours of new content are underway, including a faction, building kit with over 70 pieces, an overhaul of endgame PvE gameplay, and much more.

Although its player count has been dropping, things look to be turning around for Dune: Awakening, with tools like the long-awaited Base Reconstruction Tool arriving and Chapter 3 on the horizon. Ahead of the survival MMO's upcoming changes, I got to sit down with production director Ole Andreas Hayley and game director Viljar Sommerbak to discuss some of what Funcom has up its sleeve – and boy, is it exciting.

First and foremost, it's important to address the elephant in the room, so to speak: engame PvE content. The debate surrounding PvE versus PvP and how the balance should be struck by Funcom has been circulating online since Dune: Awakening first released in June, but Chapter 3 should clean things up a bit. "With Chapter 3, we're flushing out the PvE parts of the endgame," the developers tell me – and it lines up with their previously shared roadmap.

"The goal with the Deep Desert is to bring it back to its original vision and intention," they continue – so "if you want to do PvP or you want to do PvE, you have a space for it." I'm curious to see how it turns out come Chapter 3, personally. After all, the Deep Desert has been the source of many online discussions. There's more coming than just the revamped endgame content, however. In fact, there's a new faction in the works.

If you're a hardened Dune stan, then you probably know about smugglers – people who transport and sell controlled substances like spice melange, weapons, and you name it. The new faction to come with Chapter 3 is the Smugglers, and accompanying it is an optional building kit with a whopping 74 pieces. Funcom doesn't want to make the same mistake it did with Chapter 2's paid DLC, revealing "exactly" how much fans can expect to get out of it.

And, honestly, it sounds like a lot. Coupled with all that, decor lovers (it's me, I'm a decor lover) can expect to be able to color swatch placeable items, making for an even more faction-themed base. The devs describe plenty of little features joining Chapter 3, too, from a change to the personal light – it'll be a floating globe instead, in true Dune fashion – to bigger ones, including weapon builds like the dual blades.

You might remember the melee combat controversy (one that's honestly ongoing). Well, the devs admit, "We're not going to please everyone in Chapter 3" – but "Chapter 3 does bring with it quite a few additional works on different aspects of melee." For instance, the rapier "has gotten a bit of an overall rework" to make it play more differently than the dagger and the short blade. It's a solid start to future changes, in my opinion.

As for the story, we can expect a lot – Chapter 3 is "a love letter to the PvE players," as the devs explain. There are five to six hours of story-adjacent content with new cinematics and fully-voiced lines, which is great to hear is coming alongside "bosses with phases" and fresh dungeons. The future, and I'm talking post-Chapter 3, also feels bright overall for Dune: Awakening, as I'm told. A good chunk of it revolves around the player experience.

Heck, the two leads even hint toward "maybe" allowing you to "host your own server" with customization options to tailor things to your liking – but they "can't go into details on what that will look like because we're still kind of figuring it out internally as well." With later launches, like that of the elusive Chapter 4, in mind, the devs say Chapter 3 is setting a "foundation" of sorts, and I'm thrilled.

This is the "biggest update" Funcom has done, and I, for one, can't wait to dive into all of its content… as well as what's set to drop later down the line. Here's hoping it marks the turn of a new page for the survival MMO – it sounds well-deserved.

No, it's not just you – Dune: Awakening NPCs really did become harder as Funcom admits to "undocumented changes" in the survival MMO's last big update, says "we will revert it."