On the heels of theDune: AwakeningReddit AMA, Creative Director Joel Bylos has responded to player feedback and outlined a slew of upcoming changes to the game.
Earlierwe reported that many playersare unhappy with the state of balance in Dune: Awakening and have been waiting fortoday’s message from the Creative Director, Joel Bylos, responding directly to player concerns and feedback on the current state of the endgame activities. Many players took issue with the heavy PvP focus in the endgame, such as Landstraad and the Deep Desert.
The Deep Desert is an endgame area, a lawless and ever-changing area that resets weekly with various activities, materials to gather, and content to explore. The problem is, the Deep Desert is a PvP-only zone and forces players tocompete with the most dedicated(sweatiest) players to participate. It’s another ‘git gud’ vs. ‘gamer dads’ argument that arises every time a game tries to have both PvE and PvP content.
“We Want PvE Players To Be Able To Play The Endgame”
Gamer Dads Are Cordially Invited
PvE enjoyers can celebrate, because change is coming. “Some areas of the Deep Desert will now be flagged as “Partial Warfare (PvE),” said Bylos, “while the deepest parts of the Deep Desert will remain as they currently are – high reward, high risk areas.”
“Our goal is not to force PvE players to interact with a PvP system that they may have no interest in,” said Bylos.
Many of the upcoming changes focus on letting players enjoy the game how they want to play while preserving the main focus on guild and PvP content. “Players will be able to explore testing stations and harvest T6 resources without the threat of conflict,” said Bylos, but the top-tier rewards will still be balanced around PVP and guilds competing for resources.
I think this is a fair compromise, andthe community is in supportof these changes. “As a pro-pvp player, fair change,” said Formal-Throughput on Reddit, “Full DD [Deep Desert] wasn’t going to survive the onslaught of people wanting risk free gear, and this at least keeps most of the area able to go for fights and risky extraction gameplay. “
Continuing with the PvP changes, a hot topic of contention has been thebalance between scout and assault ornithopters(and the relative ‘uselessness’ of the assault variant). Scout ornithopters with rockets will now be slower and more risky when fired (increased heat) and a new infantry rocket launcher is coming to adjust the balance between ground-to-air combat.
And finally, one of the biggestconcerns is the Landstraad system,a weekly set of activities that players can turn in for rewards. Players can look forward to more diverse activities instead of the current (and tedious) turn-ins and crafting requests. A frequent concern is the lock-out system; once enough players have handed in their items, the tile locks out everyone else from participating. This has led to players stockpiling items to quickly turn them in right at the reset time.
“We are addressing some key flaws in the Landsraad design – the inability to hand in items after a square is completed and the rapidity at which some squares are turned in.
Stockpiling is currently rewarded, but that is not our intention for this system, and we will make some changes to address it as best we can.”
All said, it sounds like the developers are listening to player feedback and willing to make adjustments to keep the endgame alive. There’s no time estimate for when these changes will go live and still no roadmap in sight for future content, but things are looking up.
