My Disappointing Discovery About Dune: Awakening’s Endgame

The Deep Desert in Dune: Awakening sounded incredible: a huge, shifting landscape, home to the most powerful resources, colossal sandworms, and the game’s biggest PvP zone. Our guild put in dozens of intense hours, eagerly anticipating thrilling battles here. Yet, what we experienced was less the dynamic combat we’d worked for and more just flying through an empty, sandy void.

So, when we all flew out in a convoy — three assault Ornithopters at the ready after some preliminary solo grinding — we were a little disappointed. It turns out the endgame PvP of Dune: Awakening is essentially a flight simulator. Float around in your Ornithopter and occasionally fire rockets at someone. It’s sort of fun. Sort of.

There Is Some PvP, Sure

Okay, okay. Maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic and a little harsh. I did have one PvP encounter on foot during the last Coriolis Storm (the large sandstorm that wipes the server weekly), which provides a short window to raid other players’ bases. It was all a bit chaotic, and the screen was shaking and covered in sand, but I did in fact shoot another player in the head. I think.

Other than this, I’ve never encountered another player on foot. I’m not sure whether this is just bad luck — there are reasons to leave your Ornithopter, like collecting Spice or harvesting rare resource nodes — or whether the game just puts such an emphasis on Ornithopter gameplay that no one is really bothering to engage in any of the other mechanics.

I blame the Shai-Halud. These giant worms are frequent in the Deep Desert (as they should be, they’re a key cornerstone of life on Arrakis), so frequent that it makes any excursion in ground vehicles a death wish. You can drop a Buggy into the sand with a Carrier, and then pick it up again, but every time we’ve tried this, it’s been an absolute disaster. Skill issue? Yeah. Maybe. Or…maybe the Deep Desert needs a little bit of a rework.

Alright, Enough Complaining, What’s The Solution?

Luckily, the developers have already promised that they’re going to rework how Ornithopters take damage to prevent players from using them as battering rams to squish unsuspecting wanderers in the desert, but I think there should also be more opportunities for on-foot PvP dotted around the Deep Desert.

The magic of an ever-shifting zone is that this shouldn’t be too hard to implement during a weekly wipe. Spice is what the endgame revolves around — as it should — but at the moment, the only real way to collect mass amounts of spice is at spice fields. Spend too long on the sand and you’ll get eaten by a worm. It’d be great to see some other types of points of interest that allow players to collect spice – possibly a factory, a refinery, something like that?

This would open up the doors to more interesting PvP engagements and actually give players a reason to test out all the abilities, weapons, and armour they’ve been grinding for. I’ve gone for a Mentat Sniper build and have some pretty tasty bits of gear, but why would I ever need them if I’ve got 99 rockets and a gang of Ornithopters to back me up?

Funcom’s developers have been remarkably receptive to player feedback and very communicative this past week, especially now that the game is widely available. I’m confident we’ll see more diverse PvP options in the future; they’d be wise to cater to PvP enthusiasts, as the game clearly has the potential for really enjoyable battles.

Compiled by ApocaGames