Dune awakening

It is time for our next look behind the curtain. We have a few major updates to discuss today regarding our development, self-hosted servers with a customizable full gameplay experience and a rework of how PvP and PvE interact in Dune: Awakening. Balancing Priorities From our very first Closed Beta Weekend, player feedback has been instrumental in shaping the game. We strive to iterate quickly, but game development is rarely linear, and our resources must constantly be balanced between polishing existing content, responding to live situations, preparing the console launch, and developing new features or content. Adjusting the scope and timing of content releases to match what our team can realistically deliver is an important part of that process.

PVE-first Open World Survival 

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. We also want Dune: Awakening to feel like a triumph of your own making. Players should have the agency to tailor their experience and gravitate toward others with similar motivations, coexisting within the community.

Dune: Awakening offers a variety of playstyles. However, 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. 

Combining our goals, the in-game data, and the results of player surveys, made it clear that we needed to rethink our approach and underline the PvE-first nature of the game. While PvP conflict is an important aspect of Dune: Awakening for some, it must be optional and incentivized rather than required for progression. 

New repeatable gameplay loops in Chapter 3 have alleviated some of these concerns. These new features include Specializations, reworked Landsraad Missions and Faction Rank progression, and new scalable Testing Stations.  
To further emphasize the PvE-first approach, we are making the following changes in Patch 1.3.20.0: 

Self-hosted Servers Are Coming! 

We are thrilled to announce that Self-Hosting is coming to Dune: Awakening. Whether you want to host a private server for friends or foster a community with unique rules, the power is moving into your hands. 

The initial iteration, which will be available for testing soon, will require a few extra steps to set up and feature a limited range of customization settings. These settings will include resource harvesting rates, adjustable limits on base building pieces, or item durability and base decay options, with more customization settings being rolled out later. All these customization options will also be available on private servers right from the start. We are releasing it early to get feedback on this experimental version and improve it alongside you. More features and improvements will be added throughout the year. 

Full instructions on how to set up and customize self-hosted servers will be included in the patch notes when the feature becomes available. Please be advised that the initial setup for this first iteration of the feature is more technical than most other games and requires a computer running Microsoft Windows Pro with Hyper-V in order to run the servers in a Linux Virtual Machine (VM). 

We are, of course, still working on future updates. The goal is to work on improving these customization tools along with those releases, but we will talk about that in dune time. We are excited to continue crafting a survival experience that can stand the test of time in the new era of Dune: Awakening.