Funcom’s Dune Awakening has seen another major change as of late. Following the game’s massive endgame shift for its Chapter 3 update, the studio has split the game’s Deep Desert into PvP and PvE instances, allowing players to choose what experience they want.
As the team continues down its 10-year-plan for the game and works on the title’s upcoming console version, creative director Joel Bylos explains that this change should help to improve both aspects of the game.
“We’re in this for the long run, right?” Bylos told us in a recent interview. “So, we pay a lot of attention to what players are doing in addition to what they’re saying. Because people say a lot of stuff and then you see how they actually play the game, you look at their play-path and make decisions based on it.”
Bylos explained that there’s a large number of players who have never engaged in PvP with other players. “Some people just stick their head in and go to the PvP area and leave again,” he explained. Additionally, there are players who adore PvP, but they should also be matched with others who want to actively engage in a fight.
“It was very clear that there was a lot of information around PvP that was incorrect but being propagated,” Bylos added. “People were saying, “Oh, you have no choice but to do PvP in this game’, which after we made the very early change, you didn’t. There was no requirement to go into the PvP area, you could [still] get spice, but you couldn’t get it as efficiently.”
For Bylos, the dream of the Deep Desert was one of constant worry, but players that were disinterested with PvP would simply avoid places where PvP was present. “You wish in one hand and you s**t in the other and you see which one fills up first,” he said. “I wasn’t sitting there with a handful of wishes.”
The creative director explains that the new split not only pushes players to engage in the areas of the game they want to engage in, but also means that the team has clearer analytics to improve both aspects of the game. PvP players who want to engage in the mechanic will provide clearer data to improve PvP, and the same goes for PvE.
“What we’re doing now is segregating people in a way that allows us to put more focus into different areas,” Bylos said. While the team understands why PvP players specifically may be “somewhat upset because it feels like they aren’t focused [on]”, the developer states that the change should help to make PvP more fun in the long run.
Dune Awakening has a big year ahead of it. Alongside the upcoming console launch sometime later this year, which the team hopes will give the game a second wind, the game is also receiving a brand-new map and major improvements. For now, Funcom’s online survival game is still only available on PC.
