To date, my Dune: Awakening experience has largely consisted of building an ungainly box and hanging from the ceiling in my underwear. But more driven players have already barrelled their way to the endgame, where its “extremely competitive” PvP focus has become something of a concern for PvE players. Enter developer Funcom, which reckons it might have found a solution.
Dune: Awakening’s endgame, if you’re unfamiliar, is focused on the Deep Desert. This vast, ever-shifting landscape is where players can venture in search of valuable resources and endgame gear as they make a grasp for factional supremacy, and one that’s reset every week by Coriolis storms. It’s also PvP-focused – a design decision Funcom has previously stood firm on, even as Ornithopters rained down from above. Now, though, Dune: Awakening creative director Joel Bylos has admitted the system isn’t quite working in the way the team had hoped.
“We still believe in the core concept of the Deep Desert,” he explained in a newly shared developer blog. “The tension of heading out there, head on a swivel, eyes peeled for foes as you enter the most dangerous part of the most dangerous planet in the universe. Our wish was that players would embrace this loop, forming guilds to work together to overcome the bleakness of the Deep Desert… The reality is that players are reporting being cut out of the endgame due to the extremely competitive nature of the Deep Desert.”
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This runs counter to the team’s vision, according to Bylos. “We want PvE players to be able to play the endgame and have access to the content of the endgame. Our goal is not to force PvE players to interact with a PvP system that they may have no interest in.”