Dune: Awakening is off to a great start: excellent Steam reviews, a growing playerbase, and few of the launch problems that regularly plague popular new multiplayer games.
There is some trouble brewing, however, as players begin exploring Dune: Awakening's endgame, much of which revolves around PvP in the deep desert—a massive, uninhabitable zone only traversable by air where players can compete for precious resources like spice and titanium.
But there's one more resource that can be found in great supply in the deep desert: player complaints about the deep desert. The good news is that Funcom seems to be listening and is working on making some adjustments to PvP.
One issue with Dune: Awakening's endgame is that so much of the PvP in the deep desert is ornithopter-based, so those 60 or so hours you spent building your character's abilities are sort of useless. In most fights it's just pilots trading missiles with each other in the air instead of engaging on the surface with swords, shields, and skills.
And speaking of 'thopters, there's also a "goomba stomping" meta in Dune: Awakening where airborne players can just crash their birds into players on the ground in PvP zones, crushing them to death while not worrying about collision damage. That's not exactly what I'd call a fair fight.
As far as the occasions where players do mix it up on land face-to-face, there's yet another problem: respawn timers. Specifically, they're barely timers at all. If you kill an enemy, they're going to respawn so quickly and so close by it's hard to get a leg up on them.
As spotted by Anna Koselke at GamesRadar, a post on Reddit outlined the problem. "The biggest issue I see and hope they fix ASAP is the respawn times. Even when you win a long winded battle the losing team will just re-spawn instantly in the local area," wrote rustypipe7889 on Reddit.
The issue was apparent in "a large 3 way battle at one of the PVP ships in the deep desert," they said, noting that "even when you pick off members they are back in the fray before you can blink, which just feels bad." It's hard to win a battle and loot your enemy when they keep popping up for more a few seconds later.
They compared it to Last Oasis, another desert-based PvP-heavy multiplayer game that's had its own share of troubles, noting that Dune: Awakening's respawn timer seems to be only about 12 seconds long. "As it currently stands even if you have the better team and beat the odds the larger group will always win as they can just keep chucking bodies at it till the other team gives up or their gear breaks," rustypipe7889 said.
On the plus side, Funcom is listening. Creative director Joel Bylos responded to the post, stating "We are working on a bunch of changes/fixes to these things. Please bear with us."
I haven't engaged in PvP yet myself in Dune: Awakening, partially because, as in the beta, I just don't run into other players that often even when hanging around in PvP zones looking for trouble. And while I have been to the deep desert, I didn't see anyone around—though my 'thopter doesn't have weapons yet so I didn't stay there for more than about 30 minutes. Until some PvP patches roll out from Funcom, I might just hold off on trying to fight other players for the moment.
