The Deep Desert: a vast expanse of ever-shifting sand, the home of Dune: Awakening’s most precious and most powerful resources, as well as worms large enough to swallow several Ornithopters in a single gulp. It’s also the largest PvP area in the game. Like many others, our guild was pretty excited to check this zone out and engage in some thrilling fights with others on the server. This is what we’ve been working towards for the past few dozen hours. Gruelling but satisfying work.
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?
The devs at Funcom have been very receptive to player feedback and openly communicative over the past week, especially now that the game is in everyone’s hands. I’m sure we’ll hear more about different types of PvP in the future — they’d be remiss not to cater to those who enjoy it, as the potential is there for a really fun time.
Dune: Awakening
- Released
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June 10, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Funcom
- Publisher(s)
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Funcom
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5
